


Unacknowledged Poets

by executrix



Category: Blake's Seven, Firefly
Genre: AU, Gauda Prime, Multi, PGP, Serenity - Freeform, crossovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-15
Updated: 2010-02-15
Packaged: 2017-10-07 07:16:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In an alternative version of the events at Gauda Prime, General Blake continues the struggle against the Federation of Allied Planets, facing new challenges--including a novel form of chemical warfare. The former members of Serenity's crew are important to the efforts, although not necessarily in the ways Blake wanted them to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unacknowledged Poets

**Author's Note:**

> ADDITIONAL WARNINGS: Some violence (not explicit). Character death (suicide; not major character).
> 
> This is a sequel to The Rebel's Disciple http://www.b7fic.com/viewstory.php?sid=521, which explains WTF the Firefly crew is doing in an alternate version of the last episode of Blakes7. However, the tone of the two stories is a little different, and I changed my mind about some stuff.   
> Thanks to dear Mr. Trollope for the loan of the plot of "The Eustace Diamonds." #4: Jayne's zoology lecture is adapted from a Nathan Fillion interview (although he was talking about Canada, not Gauda Prime). The exchange in #22 about the properties of a certain chemical is paraphrased from the B7 episode "Weapon," and a touching moment in #68 is, of course, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.   
> In a sushi bar, "Omakase" means something between "gimme the Blue Plate Special" and "knock me out" but literally it means "I trust you."

_You knew me as a loser, but now you think I just might win.  
You always knew how to stop me, but you never had the…discipline.[…]  
I don't like your fashion business, Mister.  
I don't like the drugs that keep you thin.  
I don't like what happened to my sister.  
First, we take Manhattan…then we take Berlin!_ (Leonard Cohen)

1 **TamoRex (TRX) 62 ¾, down ¼ in light trading**  
_What's killing a man, compared to…hiring a man?  
What's robbing a bank, compared to…owning a bank?_ (Brecht)  
"I have some bad news," Avon said, reaching for a fork.   
"No croissants today?" Mal asked.  
"I could stand to lose a few kilos."  
"Only reason you eat them things is 'cause they're the most work for Luz," Mal said, ripping up a tortilla and dunking it into a huevo ranchero.  
"Yes, well, I like poached eggs, and we pay her more than a Cabinet Minister, so…"  
"What was that bad news of yours?"

"I was looking over the daily reports," Avon said. "I'm afraid that now we're entirely legitimate and are earning a living running a bank."

Mal shook his head, said, "Gorrammit!" and slugged down a mouthful of coffee.  
Some eight months earlier, shortly after the Battle of Gauda Prime, Mal and Avon had decamped in disgrace. Avon's only solace, at that bitter time, was the remnants of the Big Wheel's money that he was able to scoop up from various boltholes.   
For a while, Tarrant, River, and Kaylee went along with them. Kaylee was the first to leave. Much as she loved Serenity, she couldn't stand to watch Mal's descent. River was the next to head back to Gauda Prime Base. She decided that she could use some structure. Tarrant followed her although he could tell that she was going to dump him as soon as he got someplace with a fair choice of girls he could delude himself he was in love with.   
Then, after several months neither Avon nor Mal could remember very well except that they suspected they had done a lot of stupid things, the money ran out. With Kaylee gone, Serenity was too fragile to be trusted for more than an occasional outing. At some point they had managed to buy a large house on VanVliet, a boring border moon. Or maybe they'd won it in a poker game. Neither of them had any details, but the deed turned up while they were packing for a hurried exit from a sordid rented flat They couldn't turn down the prospect of a roof over their heads, even if it wasn't located anywhere they'd go deliberately.   
A hectic period of check-kiting and outright digital fabrication established them as men of some substance, by the tolerant standards of VanVliet. They managed a few coups in property development with little more than a snarl, a shoeshine, and one good suit apiece (not precisely paid for—Avon had read "Vanity Fair"). They were generous in lending their money, at heavy interest, to almost anyone who believed that it actually existed. It was not the sort of thing that was sustainable in the long run, but so far the hundred-yard dash paid off well.  
The botler came in with the morning hardmail. They didn't like having human servants, but Avon insisted on making an exception for Luz, on the grounds that a cook is an artist, not a menial. "Nice touch," Avon said, reading "Capt. Malcolm Reynolds and Guest," upside-down on the thick cream envelope.  
"Bedamn!" Mal exclaimed, Avon craned his neck and continued reading.  
"The pleasure of your company is requested at the marriage of Major Kaywinnet Lee Frye to Captain Ronaldreagan Xiang, Thursday, Fourth Revolutionary Month, 28th Day, Gauda Prime Base." The engraved invitation gave the access datacodes. Hand-written across the bottom was, "You gotta come and give me away. And bring my dress, of course." There was a pink-lipsticked kiss.   
"Looks like the young doctor slipped the trap," Mal said. "Sure hope he didn't need to chaw off his own paw to do it. Sewed me up a few times. Might have to do it a few more."   
"I see," Avon said, pouring out the last cup in the French press. He cleared his throat. "Then we're done here?"  
"Ain't we, Kerr? This is a long damn time for me to be dirtside. And maybe we better pull the plug 'fore the reubens catch on."   
"Are you going to stay…there?"  
"'Course not," Mal said, suppressing an impulse to yell "Gauda Prime! Gauda Prime! Gauda Prime!" at the top of his lungs, just because he could. "When we divvy up, I'll have plenty to fix up Serenity, take back such of my crew as had enough of your man's speechifying, and show 'em a clean pair of heels. But I can't miss Kaylee's wedding, can I?"  
2.  
"Huh," Mal said. One reason he didn't really want to be on Gauda Prime Base was the number of corners that could be turned to run smack dab into someone…not that he didn't want to see, of course. But that it was awkward to meet, considering what a flagrant asshole he was acting like last time he saw her.   
"Hey, Mal. Glad you're here so I can tell you in person…" Zoe said. "I know I ain't much of a hand with letters. Come to think of it, you ain't neither."  
"Don't they feed you? You look gaunt," Mal said, figuring that in a nasty situation you might as well stomp on the accelerator.

"That's 'cause I'm pukin' for two," she said. Mal blinked and resettled his jaw. "That's right. Wash figured that now we've got our feet on the ground, it's okay. And even though I ain't exactly got the safest job in the world, there's plenty here to take care of him or her, 'f I go down. Blake's pretty pissed off, though. Had me teachin' unarmed combat 'till I started to show, then transferred me to the War College to teach Unconventional Warfare."   
"Uh, congratulations, I guess, if that's what you want."  
"Stuck in a classroom? Like it better'n' when I was facin' the other way, but not much."  
"'Course, not, Zo', I mean the baby. But do you mean to stand here and tell me that you're going to stick in this underground nuthouse? I got a bankroll now, plenty to fix up Serenity shinier'n' she ever was before, and get back to work."  
"You can't just fall out of the sky like a Capissen-38 carryin' bricks and expect me to check my ammo clips, roll my bedroll, and leave. I got a place here, Mal. We got a place here. Meanin', my husband and me, and sooner rather'n later, our kid."  
Mal was going to sit down heavily, but since they were standing in a corridor there was nothing do sit down on, and squatting on the floor just looked weak. "Zo', I never thought you'd leave me," Mal said. "After all we been through together."  
"Way I see it, you're the one's left me," Zoe said. "Browncoats don't leave a man behind, but you left **you**. Maybe there was a time when you thought there wasn't nothin' they'd let us do but crime. And mostly I guess you thought t was all a defeated man was good for. But it never set right with Wash, and he always wanted to find somethin' legit. Hell, Mal, I could understand Niska makin' me choose. I chose Wash. Day I never thought'd come would be **you** makin' me choose. And, y'know what, I chose him, and I always will."   
"That's prob'ly the most words I ever heard you say at once, Zoe," Mal said.   
"Must be a genetic defect," Zoe said. "Men never hear good, what with one ball stuffed in each ear."   
3.  
Whether as the equivalent of a ship's Captain, or as the leader of a government in exile, it was within Blake's power to perform civil marriages, but Kaylee wanted the Book of Versal Prayer service read as well, and her mind, there was only one candidate.   
A Shepherd is also a man (or a woman, in some of those newfangled sects with very few adherents). And so, indeed, is a senior Alliance officer who…well, "turned his coat" is such an ugly phrase. To say "who experienced a blinding light on the road to Damascus" is less invidious. So the man once known as Book, like so many men, feared the Dimple, and was unable to resist its sway.  
"But, Kaylee, you know that I was only pretending to be a Shepherd…and for no very noble purpose, either."  
"Well, Colonel Plunkett, you're as near to a Shepherd as we got, and I can't think of anybody I'd rather have say the words over us than you. 'Cause of what you did before, and didn't Our Lord say every man's gotta have a chance to make up for what he did and get forgave? And 'cause of all the times you pulled our chestnuts outta the fire, no matter what side you thought you was fightin' on."  
4.  
_And so I lie with her and she with me_ (Sonnet 138)  
The lovely woman drowsing next to Blake moved closer, and stroked him amorously. Blake anxiously ran through his schedule, realizing that he could—just!—manage to cross-train by engaging in complementary forms of exercise and still review a few of the more pressing folders on his desktop before the first meeting of the day. But then, Inara always knew his schedule better than Blake did himself, and he was sure she knew to the moment exactly how much time could be spared. He narrowed his eyes, and gazed at the communicator on the bedside table, willing it not to chime.   
Blake thanked—well, not the gods, because he was certain there weren't any—but whatever factors of comparative youth and robust health made him instantly responsive to Inara. It was never a problem becoming aroused—only of resisting inconvenient longings that occurred at so many impossible times.   
Inara stretched her arms overhead, tipping her head back and yawning. She crossed her arms in front of her, and the seafoam green silk chemise, trimmed with lace, glided off, accentuating the contrast between the grace of her covered body and the provocation of her skin. (Blake wore an old pair of boxer shorts, narrowly striped in red—a much less elegant, but more comfortable, form of nightwear.) Inara's knees clasped Blake's waist, and she leaned forward, bracing her palms against the wall over Blake's head. He cupped his hands beneath the Valentine's heart of her ass and lifted her. {{She weighs nothing}} he thought. {{Nothing.}}   
Blake admired the contrast between the frenzied loose coils of dark hair spilling down her back and the trimmed velvet, like a croquet lawn or a lioness' pelt, between her legs. It seemed like a play on words made physical: wildness visible, elegant restraint in the private sphere. Blake kissed her, then licked and pressed his tongue into her until, as far as he could tell, her sighs and motion (rocking outside, rippling within) were entirely genuine, or at least as genuine as they could be.  
{{Not bad for an old man}} he thought complacently, looking at the blunt surge, like a pillar candle. Inara pushed back from the wall, fitted herself over him, and slipped down, bending all the way back. He could just reach her breasts with the utmost stretch of his fingers. He groaned. He hoped he would never have to describe these amazing sensations to a Martian who might, cursed with objectivity, wonder why it was so wonderful to have part of your body so seized, and so crushed (Blake knew that it was as easy for Inara to stroke him that way as it is for him to manipulate a pen to sign a document), so flooded with thick heat.   
Blake had asked Inara to be candid about her pleasure, to let him know what she enjoyed, and not to counterfeit bliss when what she felt was good sportsmanship. He hoped that he had really pleased her, but he suspected that, between time and training, she was walled off from access to knowing what she wanted.  
{{We're quite a pair}} he thought. He'd spent most of his life as a drugged blameless citizen, then years when he didn't know how much of what he remembered was real, then years when he couldn't tell hopes from strategies from promises from outright fabrication. He had made a progress from induced amnesiac to military leader, so what better consort than a Companion turned diplomat? Neither of them could tell, any more, when they were lying.   
"Just a few minutes of languor," Inara said. "Then I'll have to get to my office and start translating those communiqués so I can send them over to the Intelligence Committee in time to prepare for Wednesday's meeting."   
Blake didn't believe that Inara would really use the broom to sweep him out (or beat him out) of their quarters, but he agreed with her that his morning constitutional, before tackling the day's work, was good exercise.  
He took the elevator up to surface level. He pretended to walk up the 112 steps of the narrow, twisting staircase, and Inara pretended to believe him.   
The sun was brilliant. As the day progressed, the cloud cover would thicken, there would be a brief, soaking rain, and there would be a few clear hours before sunset.   
The stroll around the base might have been good exercise, but Blake never really enjoyed it. Perhaps if he had lived on Earth when it was still Earth-that-Was, with populations free to move around the landscape and not confined to protective Domes, he would have enjoyed the forests that were growing again since the Federation abandoned Gauda Prime and left it an Open Planet. He had been able to tolerate brief vacation visits to his uncle's Exbar home, but that was when he was younger and more emotionally flexible. Outdoors now seemed…too big, too little defensible. Even if a rebel patrol reassured Blake that no human enemies lurked in a stand of trees, there might be…large, growling things with fangs and claws.   
It made Blake feel much better about the whole thing when a large growling thing appeared in the Mess Hall. Roasted over an open fire, with plenty of bread to sop up the gravy, and plenty of native tubers roasted alongside. They did have canned and frozen and freeze-dried vegetables, but they had to be imported at vast cost, so Blake had a sentimental attachment to Frizzled Yams and Pannays.  
Once, when Jayne was muling over a delivery of game for the commissary, Blake idly asked him a question about the native ursine species. Jayne said that they were pretty easy to tell apart. If you tried to run up a tree but it caught you and et you up, that'd be your Magnusson's Great Urzenar. If you run up the tree and the b'ar et up the tree and then you got turned into a cocktail cherry, that'd be your Black Doom Urzenar.  
Blake was sorry that he asked.  
5.  
The comm clanged. "Attention! Hunterton Brikkling's ship has docked, and he's got Kaylee's rings! Gate Nineteen!"   
For want of anything better to do, Avon followed the (largely distaff) crowd that boiled in a surge down to Gate Nineteen. Kaylee, in a camouflage uniform with a ton of fruit salad, and a stocky young man in a conspicuously less decorated dress uniform, were at the eye of the storm. So was a middle-aged man holding a velvet box. The man in the dress uniform (his nameplate said "Xiang") bowed his head, took possession of the box, and ceremoniously slipped the pink sapphire ring onto Kaylee's finger, stowing the wedding rings in his pocket. They smooched,and captures were taken. A squealing circle formed around Kaylee, to admire the ring, and soon she and her fiancé bobbed off, on a wave destined to break at pub opening hours in the Oleg Gan Community Room.  
The bringer of the box was of average height, his body rounded and a little soft. He had blue-black hair, a rugged face with a rakishly broken nose, and a protuberant chin.   
Avon took a second look at the sapphire blue eyes: contact lenses, of course. "Oh, it's you," he said. "I'd wondered, vaguely, what became of you."  
"I've got a gun, Avon!" Brikkling said.   
"I don't doubt it for a minute," Avon lied. If nothing else, he owed the man the tribute of looking frightened. "I haven't. I don't carry one…anymore. I mean you no harm, although I can understand that it'll be difficult to get you to believe it."  
"We can't talk here," Brikkling said, obviously pondering whether to make a break for it back to his ship. "The walls have ears!"  
"Have they, V….now?"   
"Dunno, but they might. I didn't get where I am today by being a babe in the woods."  
However, by the time Brikkling felt comfortable about talking, they **were** in the woods, Avon sitting under a tree, leaning back against the bark, Brikkling looming over him.   
"And just where did you get, Hunterton?"  
"That's Mr. Brikkling to you, Kerr."  
Avon shrugged. Not caring about the outcome gave him a strategic advantage. "During my last visit to this planet, you were engaged in socially useful work in the hospital."  
"Yeah, you wouldn't think that would last long, and it didn't. Soolin and I peeled off, we hadn't taken the King's Shilling or anything, and Blake trusted me not to drop a credit on him. Didn't trust Soolin so much—by association with you—but, well, she's not a girl you piss about, and if she wanted to leave, she left. Dr. Tam fixed me up a bit, just so's I'd look different. And then, when I had a few bob in my pocket, I had some more work done to look handsome, get a leg up in business deals, get a leg over and improve my pulling power. Being rich does that, too."  
"Are you rich, then? I am. Or at least I can get people to believe it, which is much the same thing. I managed to score off the banking system, at last. What did you do?"  
"Soo and I went to Beaumonde, she got a job working security at a posh casino. I started out as a bartender. Then I started to notice that there's lots of tourists there. Come from all sorts of places, you know? And the girls might have one kind of earrings one place, and just wear necklaces somewhere else. I mean, they'd wear clothes—at least till the story gets further along—but different necklaces from different places.   
And when people see something a bit different, it takes 'em two ways. Either they say it's the devil's work and they want to throw a barbecue to celebrate, or they've got to pay over the odds because it's imported and exotic. I signed up for overtime on the cruise shuttles, and in the morning, when the punters were still sleeping off the drinks I mixed 'em the night before, I'd go to the market and buy a lot of cheap tat.   
Then I'd wait for the next lot of tourists from somewhere else and tell 'em it was one hundred percent stolen goods from the very best stately homes, worth five thousand plat but 'cos it was nicked I'd have to let 'em rob me and only give me two thousand. And I'd let 'em beat me down to a thousand, 'cos I paid forty credits for it in the first place and even if they decided to swap yarns with another tourist on the same cruise, by the time they could get mad at me, they'd be long gone. Made a packet that way.  
Also, once people have had a few, they start to carry on about what they used to eat when they were a nipper. Rich blokes'll pay more for a box of grotty biscuits that look like they glow in the dark than for chateaubriand and champagne—long's you had to ship 'em three thousand spatials. Made another packet. Sometimes you need a cargo hold full of, oh, I dunno, steel wool or a load of something else boring just so's no one notices the two kilos of interesting tucked away somewhere remote. So then I was in the business of, you know, everything for everybody. Came back last year—when, from what I hear, **you** were still face-down in the gutter—and told Blake he could have old pals' rates on procurement of stuff Dayna couldn't sell him. He didn't like it much, bit of a snob, all those Alphas, but he hadn't a better offer."  
"It's a shame Mal didn't meet you when he was out in the Black," Avon said, wincing a little at the "face-down" bit but unable to rebut it. "He could have used someone with your business acumen, and his ship had a thousand places for those interesting two kilos."  
6.  
Inara, not without a pang, gave Kaylee a priceless piece of Bellerophonian lace for her veil. It was just the beginning of autumn on Gauda Prime, and the few flowers that grew there had come and gone, so Kaylee carried a prayer book trimmed in bright ribbons instead of a bouquet.   
The Olag Gan Community Room was permanently flower-decked, where Kaylee had employed her motor pool to stencil flowers on one wall, so that's where the altar was set up. The painted blooms would show in the wedding Captures.  
After Kaylee and Ronnie signed the register, the bridal party trooped off to the Computer Room for the new Revolutionary tradition, the Changing of the Name Tags. After a good deal of lobbying, Blake decided that married women would be issued name plates and dog tags with hyphenated names. (The factions in favor of husbands receiving hyphenated name tags as well, those opposed to marriage as counter-revolutionary, and those raising the possibility of dual husbands or dual wives fought a good fight, but decided to pick their battles and go along with the new procedure.)  
That turned Kaylee into Major Frye-Xiang, which was too long for comfort, so she was usually called Foxy, just as Zoe was usually called Captain AW, and indeed, why not?  
After the wedding, she cut down her dress to knee-length, and gave the extra layers, and the veil, to the Quartermaster Corps (or, as Blake insisted on calling it, the Wardrobe Room). Future Brides, For the Use Of.   
Blake rather wondered what would happen if the war lasted long enough for Corporal Taylor-Siemanski to marry Sergeant Jefferson-Plyler and then breed. Perhaps they would have a yet newer tradition of flipping a coin to pick a brand-new name of four or fewer syllables.  
But then, sometimes the General let himself dwell on the vision of paying yet another tiresome visit to a crèche, and hearing yet another teacher say, "Blake L., put away the tea set! Roj! That toy pursuit ship is Blake W's! Give it back to him!" then spotting the President himself and stammering, "I mean….children! You should all share!" It seemed far more productive than dwelling on the many other things that could happen in the future.  
7.  
Avon was the very definition of persona non grata at the Gauda Prime Base, and Mal's credit wasn't much higher, certainly not enough to get them assigned quarters at the base. They spent a few nights in Mal's cabin on Serenity, which was downdocked in the Visitors' ship hangars. It felt weird without a crew—like spending the night in a museum. (Or like getting locked up in a jail cell for fun; Mal had once robbed a charity benefit like that, none of the rich folks could get out of the cells fast enough to chase him.) Now they could afford to repair Serenity, but Mal didn't really trust anyone except Kaylee, and between honeymooning and running the Motor Pool she had no free time or energy.   
So Mal and Avon (who had nothing but free time, but little energy and no goals) ended up renting a room from Jayne and Dayna. The long-a duo had built themselves a sprawling house, mostly underground, camouflaged by vines that bore huge squashy gray-green leaves. Here and there, a tree trunk grew through the floor. Dayna was used to living underground: it made her feel comfortable and safe. Jayne didn't really hold with foofaraws as long as the roof kept the rain off his head and the bed was comfortable and well-tenanted. He wasn't afraid of hard work, and when the hunting was bad, he tended to play a little guitar and then take up his tools and build on another room.  
Avon and Mal could have afforded to rent three or four of the nineteen rooms in the house, or indeed to buy the whole house out of the interest on the interest on their money, but Avon didn't like Jayne and Dayna didn't like Mal. That left Mal and Avon bunking together once again, just to have somebody to talk to, and Avon ended up cooking most of the meals for the four of them to have something to do.   
"Gonna be Dayna's twenty-first birthday kinda soon," Jayne said, smoking a cigar (a Brikkling Corona-Corona) and supervising Avon's dishwashing. "That's a big milestone."  
"I'd forgotten," Avon said. "I'll buy her something horribly expensive. You know her best, what would she like?"  
"She'd prob'ly get a real charge outta another Callahan, y'know, like Vera, but she don't really shoot at nothin' 'cept game, and a Callahan would like to vaporize a spubcat or gallebar, which kinda ruins the whole point of shootin' them and freezin' 'em down to sell to the base," Jayne said thoughtfully. "We got a crossbow, o'course, but we could always use some more. Berronium-tipped carbon arrows, that's always appreciated."  
Avon concluded that Jayne was the sort of person whose usual presents to his girlfriend ranged within the corridor from his favorite brand of hooch to black lace underwear, with stops at boxes of his favorite kinds of sweets.   
"I got it nailed, though," Jayne said. "I'm gonna give her something she'll really like. I'll assassinate Servalan—well, Sleer she goes by now."  
"Jayne, I really don't think that's a good idea."  
"Huh. Dayna was right. You got a soft spot for her."  
"Of course I don't! It was you I was concerned about—God knows why. Even a lowly Federation Commissioner has security, you know."  
"Whatever rathole she's hidin' in, bound to stick her head out some time. And I can put a bullet through it from clear the other side o'town."  
"Don't you think that it's punishment enough—to fall from Supreme Empress to a minor functionary?"  
"What, after all she done, you think that her sittin' around like your boy Blake shufflin' papers is any kinda justice? I don't, and I been a crook my whole life till I fetched up here as a big-game hunter. And I got nothin' but time to track her from one hidey-hole to the next. I mean, the Greensalmon won't be upstream for weeks yet, and we can net 'em and salt down the catch in just two-three weeks and then I got time on my hands again. Anyways, Dayna's workin' on some hoity-toity night-vision scope for Blake, so's I don't see her from can't-see to can't-see as it is. Wouldn't see her any less if I was out of town."  
"But a good deal less if you were dead."  
8.  
"You've got Kaylee safely married off," Avon said. "What are you planning to do now?"  
"Lookin' back on it, some of my plans maybe didn't turn out the way I wanted," Mal said. "Could be time for someone else to make the plans. Maybe I'll stay around here for a while. You?"  
"I may, ah, regroup my forces until I think of what to do next. If I were you, I wouldn't venture too much on a cult of Blake's personality."  
"That's just what you ain't, though. Me, I mean."  
And that, Avon reflected, was about the amount of thanks you could expect when you pick a man out of the gutter and place him in the way of being a millionaire.  
"Where you headed? Mayhaps I'll let your pal have the use of Serenity for a while, but I'm sure that fella Brikkling would sell you passage on one of his supply runs."  
"If he did, then for the cargo's sake, I hope his commercial instincts would overcome his…memories," Avon said obliquely. "Ah. No, I think I'll stay here for a while. I can envision some interesting projects."  
"Blake ain't had you shot or thrown you in the hoosegow, but I misdoubt he really wants you here."  
Avon shrugged. "He doesn't know everything. Even when he was, you might say, the face that launched one ship, he rather favored the big picture over micro-management."  
{{Aww, crap}} Mal thought. {{Like I'm going to take management advice from a fella who drove both his spaceships into a rock.}} "What kinda projects?" he asked.  
"I like Dr. Tam," Avon said. "He looks stubborn."  
A moment later, in the ship hangar's computer lab, River suddenly said, "Jest for a twelvemonth in a hospital. Jest a boy who cain't say no." Wash blinked and thought {{Here we go again}} but then, he figured, he and River were programming a simulator for the K-329 Coppergnat bomber, and Wash wanted the giant blue teddy bears on the runway to squeal if the landing gear came down too fast, so who was he to talk?  
9  
Colonel Plunkett hadn't really noticed who was at the table, so when he glanced up from his dinner tray and saw Mal sitting on the other side of the table, his first thought was to abandon the tray and get the hell out of there, followed by a more moderate approach such as leaving but taking his dinner with him.  
"You look very settled there, Mal. Thinking of joining us?"  
"What's the 'J' for, anyway?" Mal asked furiously, looking at Plunkett's name tag and stabbing his own cup of coffee with a wooden stirrer, which didn't do much except splash Mal's shirt cuff.   
"Jeroen," Plunkett said. "You're not really angry at me, Captain Reynolds."  
"Got plenty of that dollar-book Freud stuff from 'Nara. And I am, of course. I don't take kindly to snakes in the grass on my ship."  
"Was there grass? I don't seem to have encountered it. And, after all, when I was in your company, I did nothing to carry out my mission. Rather the opposite, in fact."  
"Whose mission you carryin' out now?"  
"Oh, the General is quite satisfied not only with my intelligence and law enforcement experience, but has put his faith in me."  
"Faith? You'd think that that word would burn in your mouth, like this Love in a Canoe…like it would if it was hot. "  
"If you've got any constructive suggestions on that subject, the Quartermaster would be glad to hear."  
The colonel pressed the side of his fork gently into the apex of his wedge of pie. The line server, when asked for a description of the pie, would go no further than "Red." Anything else must have been on a need-to-know basis.   
"Too bad Simon ain't here, he'd slap some vasoconstrictors right on that bad boy," Mal said.  
"Our young doctor has found a niche here," Plunkett said, ignoring Mal's flinch at the pronoun. "And his sister is positively blooming. Zoe and Wash are happy here. Jayne is…well, he's happy, and purely by coincidence he's here, I suppose I should say. Your association with Kerr Avon does you no good, of course, but I think Blake would be prepared to overlook that, given your expertise in unconventional warfare."  
"Given my ship to him, you mean, which so far I ain't. Blake's the sticking point here, Boo…Plunkett. It's all well and good to say that he's for freedom, against tyranny, but what's that mean? Seems to me like everyone says that, they're the good guy and it's the other fella that's the tyrant. Or, everyone's got the direct line to the Lord Almighty, it's the other fella that's the heathen. Before Blake puts his own or someone else's life on the line, I conjure that he'd best know what's to come of what he believes in. He says he's for freedom, but freedom for who? History books that I'm supposed to be too dumb to have ever read tell how there was a big war back in the free-range Earth days, fought by folks who didn't hold with those of your complexion havin' over-much leisure time. Hell, only reason for the Atomic War that squoze out near everyone and stuck the rest under Domes was one lot of folks with your beliefs and another lot of folks prayin' to Allah instead. And they all thought they were fightin' the good fight and headed straight to heaven."  
"I think Blake is a man of principle, but he's no fanatic," Plunkett said. "I think this is a cause you could be comfortable with supporting. As I say, much of my career was in law enforcement…"   
"And the rest of it in pure-d deviltry."  
"…and I pride myself on having developed some instincts about the men and women I encountered. There's a theatrical trope, you know, of the traumatized war veteran. At best, he's been rendered cynical by the horrors he encountered; at worst, a psychotic."  
"Your folks would know about makin' their own psychotics like one of those little kits for a kid to build log cabins."   
"In between, the criminal loner who can never fit in to society. I was somewhat bemused, Mal, by your persistence in minor criminality when it certainly brought you little profit, and I daresay little personal satisfaction."  
"'Minor'?" Mal said. "I can still kick your ass, you know."  
"You've already accused me of treachery, so factor in age and its predicted effect on youth and skill. But my point being…"  
"Team you used to play for, they kind of cut back on the options available to me."  
"But perhaps not quite as far as you liked to pretend?"  
"See if I care what you think of me, Shep…, awww, whoever you call yourself now. When I had folks dependin' on me, I did what I had to do to keep flying. And there might or night not be any Hell after the one was make for each other when we're alive, but there sure ain't no reward for bein' good. If the bad things are near to hand, I'll do 'em."  
"You're on your own now, Mal. Many of those people are here now, because of this movement and what it can offer them. What would you do if the better things are near at hand? Why not stay here? I don't think you're a bad man, fundamentally."  
"If I ain't bad, then why'd God desert me?" Mal blurted.   
In the ensuing silence, Plunkett piled dishes and cutlery onto his tray, and stood up.   
"Folks I killed when I wore a uniform, and folks I killed when I didn't, they're both still all dead," Mal said. 'And if I'm gonna kill a man, I want it to be 'cause I thought he needed it, not 'cause of some orders from above."  
"Is Above capitalized?" Plunkett asked. "Back to the grindstone for me, Mal—or should I say, Mr. Reynolds? I've got work to do. Good work, but it takes all the hands we can get to put to the plow. You had a sense of purpose once, and a belief in something greater than yourself. You could have it back again."  
10.  
"Hullo, Dr. Tam, I wanted to speak to you," Avon said. "And it's after hours. I {{hacked}} looked into the barracks assignments but I couldn't find a listing for you. I thought perhaps you would have been assigned a room in the married quarters as a perquisite, but you weren't there either."  
"I guess I don't really…live anywhere," Simon said, looking around the nutshell of the walls of the hospital wing's Supply Room. There was a cot in the middle of the room, next to a lab bench, and Simon had colonized an empty locker with a few possessions.   
"You seem to be rather at loose ends," Avon said, staring, mesmerized, at Simon. He wondered if he had ever been that beautiful, even at that age, and had to doubt it, to his chagrin as to both aspects.  
Simon nodded. "Just the other day, I was outside, walking from the Mess Hall back here, you know. And there were these soldiers, I don't know, maybe half a dozen of them? Sitting on a low brick parapet around the plaza. You know. Kids. Wearing those camouflage fatigues, the big boots, well, she wore those before, even on Serenity…Kids. They certainly weren't a string quartet. They were drinking bottles of beer and laughing about something. And River was there. She didn't even notice me, it's not the first time I've seen her across a distance. Not even the first time when she was relaxed, and happy. But I felt so…I don't know how I thought we would go back, that she could be rescued and she'd be the same. And she isn't, Avon. She's…she used to be something so special, so different. And now she's…a girl. A girl soldier, there are hundreds of them here. Maybe thousands? I didn't want her to be…permanently ruined, ground up, but…why didn't I realize that even if failure was something I couldn't survive, that success would be something that made me irrelevant?"  
"You would have needed a really good psychic to tell you what would happen after you found your really good psychic. So in the absence of that you might as well forgive yourself…"  
"You sound just like your friend Soolin," Simon said. "She thought that I needed looking after. And then she got tired of doing it and she left. Well, I'm sick of being treated as if I were a…"  
"Patient? Not everyone leaves, you know. Or at least not right away."  
Simon tilted his head, considering. Avon owed him a lot, which could eventuate in anything from groveling to gross bodily harm; debt collection was often an iffy business. Perhaps, if Avon felt deeply enough obligated, Simon could transfer a mountain of hospital paperwork to him. Furthermore, it was the second Tuesday in the month, and consequently distant from the fourth Tuesday, when Simon usually visited the sex party under the stairs in the PX, to drop off some more condoms and retrieve the amyl nitrate, and did not always take the most direct route back.  
Concluding he had little to lose, Simon put his hand behind Avon's back and reeled him in, as if they were tangoing, or as if his arm was a morning glory vine on time delay. Then he kissed Avon, and eventually stepped back and said, "I've been played, haven't I?"  
"Atrociously. Well, look at it this way. If you're entirely at loose ends, if you think that you can't find your arse with both hands and a flashlight…well, I can. The flashlight is optional."  
Simon put his hands on Avon's shoulders. They each took half a step forward and collided softly.  
Avon truly needed there to be someone to answer the fervency with which he prayed "Please don't let me fuck this up." He buried his face in Simon's neck, and swept his hand over richly smooth skin, cool beneath the thin scrub top in the sloppily heated room. He kept his eyes closed while he memorized the topography of Simon's rib cage, thinking {{Cathedral}}, slowing moving down and along until {{Oh my God}}.   
He expected to be stopped at any moment, so he wanted to move fast, to learn everything that was likely to vanish into memory. But, like Scherezade, he also needed to move slowly, to defer the moment at which Simon would, in what seemed like an entirely inaccurate phrase, come to his senses, rather than having his senses mobilized against his best interests. Avon half-turned, and half-spun Simon until he stood behind Simon, his arms tight around Simon's waist and then his hands moving slowly.  
It didn't take long for Simon's breath to catch, and when the sound upshifted to a moan, Avon whispered, "Remember, you live over the shop," and pressed his palm against Simon's mouth. Simon shivered against him, and Avon reminded himself that he'd better exploit this momentary advantage, because he suspected that he was handing Simon a blank check.  
Simon pulled away. He sat down on the cot, then stood up and ripped at the tight-drawn sheets below the pillow and sat down again. "I think it'll take the weight of two people," he said. "I'm willing to try, anyhow." He crossed his arms and started to lift off his scrub top.   
"No, don't," Avon said. "I mean, please don't. Let me." He sat down on the cot, which pitched but did not give way, and started to slip his hand into the neck of Simon's shirt but for a moment he halted, his thumb caught in the notch between Simon's collarbones.  
Avon felt stupid because he thought it would seem weak to ask Simon what he wanted, and resented it a little that his…dance partner? Chess opponent? Was a telepath, even a le-se telepath, so presumably would know without discussion what Avon wanted…But there it was, and Avon closed his eyes and it was trivial for them to breathe together, not so difficult to mirror what Simon was doing with his hands, flattering if Avon could synchronize their heartbeats. He listened for the acceleration in Simon's breath and what made it break through to a moan and then what made noises get louder or recede, what made Simon's hands tighten, when he seemed more distant, almost polite.   
Simon said, "Thank you, Kerr! That was very…relaxing," and fell asleep immediately post-gerund. Avon concluded that Simon falling asleep, like Jayne shooting things, could be performed at any time, with no diminution in the original delight.   
Avon's arm fell asleep and he certainly did not and he had no sleeves to cut but (except for stroking the back of Simon's head; Simon mumbled a cheerful "Hnrgh!" and nestled in closer) Avon made no move to get up, proud of his excruciating erection (again!), breathing around the ducktail of Simon's rather damp hair in his mouth. Approximately thirty percent of a cot in the supply room was…very far from the worst place he had ever been, or even been recently.  
11.  
(Two years earlier)  
Regan Svioboda knew that scepters generally supplemented their symbolic value, not by being pure gold—that would be too soft to hold large gems of the finest water, much less to whack anyone who contested the ruler's title—but by being studded with jewels. Some scepters were taller than a man's head; others could not only be grasped in the fist when supplicants came for justice, but could be stuffed into one's rich robes and pawned at the next principality.   
The scepter was a sign of office, but it was also a target painted on the holder's forehead. The scepter was his only as long as he could grasp it, perhaps with an interval until his dead fingers could be broken away from the symbol of office. Long live the king, in a realm where quite a few people are aware that it was not Fate alone that sheared the previous king's lifeline.  
Regan knew all this because it was a privilege, or a duty, of Central Security to delve deep into archives that were forbidden to everybody else. Her own scepter lacked jewels. It was plain, government issue, scratched here and dented there.   
She sat down at the desk that had been Anna Grant's, reached into the pile of folders, and selected one from halfway down, assuming that the ones on top were rubbish designed to waste her time.  
12.  
Avon and Simon spent a lot of time in bed together, frequently though not necessarily having sex.   
(Once, over boilermakers in Blake's private quarters, Brikkling had pointed out that there really wasn't a lot to do around there, and Blake said that it was a military base, inhabited entirely by volunteers, so they'd better get used to it. Brikkling said that no, it was a city, really.)  
When Simon and Avon were both awake, they talked a lot. They reciprocally found their dead-pan jokes hilarious, although, because he had more experience in delivering them sideways, Avon was less likely to break up at his own jokes. It had been a while since they had had much chance to talk about science, although the only topic where their areas of expertise really intersected was health care informatics. Also, now that he was rich for the first time, Avon liked to hear Simon's perspective on having been rich from the off.  
Simon liked to be held, it grounded him, and Avon was certainly not going to object to any situation that put his hands in range of so many body parts that fitted with such beautiful precision into his cupped palm. The point of a cheekbone; the bottom of a shoulderblade (with a deep groove where the side of Avon's hand could slide).   
Avon really couldn't think of anything accurate to say that was also fresh. Silk, peaches, porcelain (pale, translucent, so smooth) so he gave up and, almost angrily, said, "You're bloody good-looking you know."  
"Thanks," Simon said. "You too. Umm. Or, hot, anyway."  
Both of them appreciated sex because it turns time into taffy, into long-life noodles, slowly stretched. Each of them would slow down, hover, wanting to whisper "Beg me!" but refraining, knowing that the answer would be "I'll see you in Hell first."  
Avon treated the prospect of having Simon in his arms much the way Vila would have treated a five-gallon tub of chocolate mousse that appeared on his plate at one or another of the juvenile detention centers where he had been confined. That it had arrived there at all was almost certainly a mistake. It would be rectified soon, probably through some kind of violence. But in the meantime, he was going to get through as much of it as he could, even if it made him sick.   
13.  
_A mother only mocked with two fair babes,   
A dream of what thou wast, a garish flag_ (Richard III, IV, iv 87-88)

Years before, when Regan Svioboda was still a Captain, she met the Supreme Commander at an evening reception. Central Security officers had to wear mufti. Unlike the above-ground military, they can't splash their resumes across their chests in patches and unit insignia and campaign ribbons.  
Captain Svioboda knew better than to wear white. She chose a cocktail-length dress, with long sleeves and a high neck, in deep blue. Its retail price was eight months' salary, or the amount her husband might bet on a golf match, but it didn't really matter because the designer, declaring Mrs. Tam to be his muse, gave her free clothes for the publicity value.   
"And do you have children?" Servalan asked her, spotting the large, smooth platinum band and four-carat diamond on her left hand.  
"Two, Supreme Commander," Regan murmured, hearing the regret as Servalan thought, {{And I very nearly had fifteen.}}  
Servalan wasn't Sensitive, with or without a capital letter, so she couldn't hear Regan's bitter thought, {{and only one was good enough}}.  
14.  
Wash bent over the pool table, assessing his shot, then realized that it didn't make a damn bit of difference because he was going to win the game no matter what he did, and no matter how many of the four pints of near-beer that was the limit that could be served in the OGCC had been consumed. It was pretty clear that Ronnie Xiang had never held a pool cue before being assigned to Gauda Prime Base, having proceeded, with only few and insignificant detours, from Vacation Bible Camp to university to business school to Cauder's army.  
Wash made a point of hanging out with Ronnie, because he knew that no mere husband can compete with the poignant sweetness of a relationship that never happened. He had a few sharp moments of anxiety when Mal turned up at the base and then failed to leave, but he knew that Zoe had chosen him, over and over. Marrying him, when that was the last thing Mal wanted. Leaving Mal in Niska's temporary custody (although that was both all Wash wanted and the last thing he wanted). Staying here, when Mal wanted them racketing around on that criminous deathtrap. Staying here, where Wash felt safe enough to terrify himself into worrying about everything that could happen to a baby. Anyway, in case he ever lost the ability to think up new amusing anecdotes, it was nice to have a choice of people who had never heard the old ones.  
By and large, Wash liked Gauda Prime Base, although there were far too many candles representing his former students on far too many private altars for his taste. At times he faced problems he had not expected ever to have, such as lining up in the Mess Hall and griping "Steak! Again!" (It was more than all right with Wash that his Jayne sightings were confined to one every few months, usually shadowed by large stacks of frozen eviscerated antelopes.) Gauda Prime's climate was vile, with plenteous snow and ice storms, but when nothing was falling, the skies, unlike those of his home planet, were sparkling clear.  
He didn't entirely approve of Zoe's friends, who spent most of their time discussing weapons technicalities that Wash found tedious. On the plus side, he had the chance to talk about ships and flying with his students, as he seldom could at home. To Zoe, a ship was like a pair of boots—you climbed in and went somewhere—although her life had been placed in jeopardy by fewer boot-related accidents than mishaps on Serenity.  
Given the chance, Wash would have enjoyed spending more time with Kaylee, and their work assignments often brought them together. He was careful to avoid socializing with Kaylee alone, because he knew that Ronnie felt himself obligated to be jealous. They could have spent time together as couples, but Zoe said that the day she voluntarily spent time with a Bible-bashing bean counter would be the day she needed smoothers, and that day hadn't come yet.   
Wash was heartily glad that he and Zoe were already married by the time they got to the base, though. He knew there was no way Zoe would go back on her vows, but if she had had a broader choice of partners, he didn't think that he would have had a chance.  
But then, he reconsidered: Zoe had put a lot of time and effort into keeping Mal from getting his damn self killed, so maybe she just had a thing for utterly hapless men.  
15.  
Blake waited for the printer to groan out the document, then hand-signed it (which, although Mal hadn't been around long enough to recognize it, was a very special mark of favor). Blake rummaged through the drawer (he'd been meaning to straighten it out, but there hadn't been time, there never was…) and took out a small white box.  
"I don't think we'd have much chance of getting you to surrender your coat," Blake said. "But that's all right, we haven't enough uniforms to go around." He stood, and Mal followed suit. "Raise your right hand," Blake said, wondering idly if eventually he'd have to tailor that for tentacles the way atheists didn't have to swear on Bibles.   
Blake pinned the insignia on Mal's shoulders, shook his hand, and sat down, gazing pointedly at the pile of cubes and acetates on the desktop. "Dismissed, Lieutenant Reynolds," he said, already regretting bending over backwards for the obviously intransigent former Captain.  
But his donation of Serenity was far from trivial. There was probably only one person in the world who could get Serenity space-worthy again, but considering that she now commanded the Motor Pool, and had, although not an infinite, at least a decent complement of spare parts, Blake felt fairly sure that Major Frye-Xiang was equal to the task.  
16.  
"I don't suppose that reinforcement could hurt," Avon said, and brought Orac over to the hospital wing for River's dual therapy session with Simon.  
"You're wrong," River said, as he put the first electrode on her forehead. "You gave him the whole checkbook."  
17.  
Ronnie and Kaylee asked for ten days' leave to go and visit his parents, but Blake knew he was doing them a favor (and was prepared to suffer their vilification in silence) by reducing it to five.   
Kaylee knew she was in for it when Ronnie, shortly after proposing, said "My mother will be so happy! All my life, she's been waiting for a daughter in law to love." Then he showed her a capture of his parents. Acacia Xiang was tiny and gimlet-eyed. In the first frame, her eyes were cast down demurely, but the exposure was long enough that her eyes flicked hotly at items that attracted her displeasure. Kaylee knew that look. It was her Aunt Maureen all over. Always walking a few steps behind her husband, so he'd think he was the boss and not notice the puppeteer's hand making a mitten out of him.  
Gilbert Xiang didn't make much of a showing in the family captures. When Ronnie handed Kaylee out of the pedicab from the spaceport, Kaylee thought that he looked old, but then she figured that he'd looked old his whole life, and cohabitation with Mrs. Machiavelli there hadn't youthened him up none.   
The maid took charge of the suitcases. Gilbert clapped Ronnie on the shoulder, said, "It's good to see you, son! Come on, let's go into the den. The match starts in twenty minutes—it's the Red Chiefs hosting the Firebirds. Wait till you see the new vaporscreen—it takes up the whole back wall!"  
"The Chiefs have been disgracing themselves this season," Ronnie said. "I don't know if I can stand seeing it wide-screen and in full color."  
He kissed Kaylee on the forehead and went off to the den. Kaylee's eyes widened in horror for a moment, then she sighed. {{I love men, just love 'em}} she thought. {{But that's what they **do**. Go off and leave you when the going's tough.}}  
"Hey, I bet you got lots of pictures of Ronnie," Kaylee said brightly. "Y'know, on a bearskin rug, in his Little League uniform, whatever. All the times he made you proud."  
"This is the first time he has ever disappointed us," Acacia said. "But no, it was not necessary for us to waste film, we have many wonderful memories of our son, and the Lord has kept us healthy and not deprived us of our wits."  
Dinner was strained, although all fourteen courses were beautifully cooked. Ronnie tried to keep the conversation going, although he often ground to a halt at the verge of blurting out classified information. Kaylee was relieved when the topic shifted to the various appropriate marriages recently contracted in the neighborhood, which was boring and intended to insult her, but at least there was a flow of conversation. She hated it when people just stared at plates or each other.  
After dinner, Kaylee's offer to help with the dishes was rebuffed. Then The First Mrs. Xiang returned to the living room, briskly rubbing her hands with a dishtowel, although Kaylee suspected that the muffled hum she had heard was a dishwasher, and the maid probably loaded in the dishes at that. Acacia tucked the towel into the waistband of her skirt, then sat down on an uncomfortable chair, opened her workbox, and whirled sequined yarn around a circular needle. It was mesmerizing viewing, which was good because nobody said anything.  
Far earlier than she usually retired, Kaylee, grateful at least that she wasn't relegated to a sleeping bag in the attic, or at best the spare room with the old sewing machine, returned to Ronnie's old bedroom. He slid back to the wall to make room in the single bed. Kaylee smiled at him and started to lift off the pink gingham nightgown she'd donned to go down the hall to the bathroom to brush her teeth.   
And she felt a goose walk over her grave, because Ronnie whispered, "Oh, no, darling, it wouldn't be appropriate," words Kaylee had hoped never to hear again.  
"Why not?" she said. "I mean, we're married. We could show them the paper and everything. Matter o'fact, I mean to show 'em the captures now that Inara gave us that pretty album. We could even do it all over again, have your pastor ask a blessing and confirm our vows." (Kaylee had been forewarned that Sunday church was a multi-hour affair, and the ratio of hellfire to cheer was quite high, so it might be nice to jazz it up a little.)   
"I don't even know if I could," Ronnie whispered, even lower. "Not here!" The horseshoe-shaped nightlight burned feebly, illuminating the lariat-spinning cowboys on the wallpaper; Kaylee thought it would have been kind of hot having them as an audience.  
"Goodnight then, love," Kaylee said, kissing him on the cheek and snuggling up next to him. Ronnie thought it was his duty as a healthy young man to consummate his marriage every night that Kaylee didn't have her moontimes. Kaylee saw little to disagree with in this program, but sometimes she could use a rest.  
The last time Kaylee went to real church, before she shipped out on Serenity, the Shepherd took his text from Luke's gospel. "From now on five in one household will be divided three against two and two against three, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law." Kaylee was pretty sure that you didn't need the Son of God to tucker himself out to cause what just came natural.  
But she was also confident that, the next time Ronnie wanted home leave, for Christmas or such, she could get the General to banjax the schedule so she'd have to stay behind and Ronnie go on ahead.  
18.  
**TamoRex (TRX) 71 ½, up 2 on rumors of new product launch**  
Gabriel Tam paused, his hand halfway between his best and second-best tuxedo where they hung in climate-controlled repose. He owned a tailcoat, of course, but it was seldom called for. He decided to wear the second-best and have the best one packed, because the trip really could be quite important. Not to say that dinner with the St.Heliers was unimportant, of course. No matter how tedious.   
"That's an exquisite gown," he told Regan, who nodded impatiently (she didn't own any that weren't) as he helped her into her ermine wrap. "Oh, by the way, on Tuesday I'll be leaving for about a week. There's a drug we had to take off the general market, after sinking a good deal of effort and money into it. Side effects, the usual story. But it seems that there's some interest in government procurement…"  
"The difference between a bug and a feature is so often simply a positive attitude," Regan said. Gabriel wondered if he should simply have vanished on Tuesday, leaving a note in the breakfast nook (Regan, who was at her desk by six a.m., had her fruit salad and protein drink and espresso at five.) "Back soon, don't worry, I haven't been kidnapped." Or perhaps she would simply wait to see if a ransom demand arrived, and if it did not, that he must have gone somewhere or other voluntarily for some purpose.  
In this, he misjudged her. It was her string-pulling that landed the contract for TamoRex, a fact that could be disclosed at a later date if the project proved successful, and kept under wraps if, as Regan suspected, Commissioner Sleer fell on her face yet again.  
19.  
In addition to those who were required to turn up for early-morning PT at the Gauda Prime base, Simon usually did (for the endorphins, and to set a good example of healthful habits for his patients) and Avon sometimes did (because he knew that he was making himself ridiculous trying to keep up with his much-younger lover, but he couldn't help it). After stretches, sun salutations, the Seven Precious Gestures, and push-ups came the cross-country run.  
Avon was not a bad sprinter, but he knew his stamina needed work, and right behind Simon was his favorite landscape anyway.   
"I got a gal, she's from Osiris!" Mal yelled at the front of the pack, and "Sound off—one, two," the army dutifully responded.  
"Let's hope they cured that pesky virus!" River yelled even louder. "Sound off—three, four!"  
The herd thundered back to the start of the course. Gauda Prime's landscape was at its peak of springtime friendliness, that is to say, not up to much. It was warm enough to be able to sprawl on the grass (with due regard for its barbs) if a soldier was merely tired and not insane, and the packed dirt was not yet hot enough to fry the derriere beneath the cammies, but not cold enough to put a layer of black ice beneath the boot.   
"How was your trip?" River asked Kaylee, as she took a good slug from her canteen and passed it to Kaylee.  
"Oh, it was just awful!" Kaylee said, wondering if River really couldn't read it from her mind (or her body language) and was just asking to be polite.   
River pulled a mock-doleful face. "So why do you keep trying to find guys for me to marry?"  
"Because bein' married is real shiny. Especially here, where you don't gotta cook or wash dishes or even clean up your own quarters if you ain't on KP. Only thing to worry about is whether you're gonna get a mother-in-law who thinks that…"  
"Her poop is made of beaten gold?" River suggested.   
"She so much as told me that I wasn't what they wanted for Ronnie, they wanted him to marry someone more like Fa Mu Lan. I mean, I love Ronnie like burning, but that don't mean I think Fa Mu Lan would ever so much as look his way. And I am an Army girl, even. Ronnie's folks got a clothing store, you know? And she brung home some stuff from the store for me. Ugly as homemade sin, and so small that that stuff wouldn't've fit you back when you got your first pair of toe shoes. She fetched up this big sigh and said she didn't realize how big I was, and they probably didn't have nothin' that was big enough to be let out for my backside. I put on my best phony smile and told her didn't matter none, I hardly never needed civvies anyway. Well, that was Saturday. Sunday there was a powerful lot of church. You could just tell from her mean mouth that she'd go to one of those churches, well, you know…or I guess you don't. They pray up a storm, but then they claim they Fellowshipped you without giving you so much as a pleated-up cup of warm fruit punch."  
"I don't know much about religious services. We weren't exactly a fixture at the temple," River said. She shook her head. "What Mal said when Jayne was idol worshipped—I don't suppose he was really idle in light of his father's teachings—can be generalized to religion as a whole. We project our own needs onto the gods we give birth to, and we sacrifice them when they don't answer our prayers."  
"Don't matter how foolish folks are in terms of dumbing down the God that made 'em. 'Cause, who made the 'Verse, then? Wasn't the men that shot Earth-that-Was all to hell."  
"Men can make a planet," River said. "Or terraform a barren cold rock."  
"Only after they learned how to do it from God," Kaylee said. "And screw it up, like as not. A few years back, some folks from my town got jobs on a new planet, but after a while we stopped hearing from them, and now I heard there was some kind of terraforming fail. If they'd left it up to the good Lord, all those folks'd probably be alive today."  
River pushed herself up into a full bridge pose, her hair dangling, started a backflip, then straightened up, blinking as she remembered that that wasn't the way everybody stood up after sitting on the ground. "Nasty mothers-in-law. More exciting than the mothers who bore you. C'mon, you're due back in the hangar and I've got Group Strategy Briefing."  
"'Nara's gonna be there, isn't she? Say Hi for me. I keep thinkin' how much I miss her from back in the day on Serenity, but I didn't really see her that much then either. I bet Mal's kickin' himself, her turnin' out to be an ambassador after all, it's like an upside-down curse that he said it and God took him up on it."  
"You're talking entirely more about God than you ever used to," River said. "Haunting churches is bad for you. It's good to get you back here in the basement for the Narcotics Anonymous meeting for the opium of the masses. And Inara—who has no mother-in-law—has been trained to be far too tactful to demand to be made an honest woman, but she's the one you should be proselytizing the virtues of marriage to, not me."  
"Awww, the General says it's for her own good, he doesn't want to risk her, but everyone's seen 'Nara out and about ambassadoring, and no way that not bein' married is gonna keep her from endin' up upside-down on a meat hook if all this goes tits-up," Kaylee said. "'Sides, dependin' who who's on our side if we win, the Rim folks might think a Companion ain't good enough for the President, or the Emperor, or whatever he gets to me, and the Core folks will think he ain't good enough for her. And he might have to get married off to some Princess, to get someone into the tent who's got a big treasury and a big army and a passel of leftover daughters."  
20.  
Franz Tenhxobre, the newly installed Federation Assistant Commissioner for Porphyr Major, having heard all about Commissioner Sleer, thought that it would be a good idea to begin his tenure with a thorough and detailed inventory before his boss next favored Porphyr Major with her presence.   
It was well-known that when you invited Sleer to dinner (or failed to duck before she could invite herself), it was a good idea to sweep the more portable items of bric a brac into the vault beforehand, and count the spoons afterwards. By the luck of the draw, any Federation official might express such gracious appreciation of one's home decorations that it would be necessary to vindicate the generous praise by donating the item, but Sleer omitted the compliments and went straight for the five-finger discount.  
So Assistant Commissioner Tenhxobre was not unduly surprised to see that the Official Residence looked a little…bare. The books added up, although he did not find this particularly reassuring because he knew that it would be easy enough to supplement larceny with fiction.   
Like most Federation officials, Tenhxobre was not a great lover of the arts, so it took awhile for him to think of the museum. When he bustled through, there were no pale patches on the silk brocade walls, and each label matched up with a work of art. Or a supposed work of art. He contemplated the possibility that Sleer had sold off the real works of art and covered her tracks by having replicas—or, less genteelly, fakes—hung instead. Tenhxobre hoped that wasn't the case. He'd never detect such a fraud, unless a canvas described as pre-Atomic happened to smell like turpentine and if he left fingerprints when he touched it, or if someone toppled a marble statuette onto his well-polished boot and the "marble" cracked like an egg. Just in case, Tenhxobre had his best computer man process the security logs for the museum. There was no evidence of any break-ins, and the motion detectors had not captured any intrusions in the off-hours.  
A month later, it occurred to him to get the inventory for the museum's storeroom and check it against the actual contents. The velvet-lined niches in the Jewel Room that were supposed to hold the ancient Porphyresque Regalia were empty. Tenhxobre was angry that Sleer hadn't even taken the trouble to sling in some rubbish from a packet of detergent.  
A fat lot of good the Regalia had done to the Joffthyll dynasty who were supposed to be protected forever against foreign threats, shadows walking by night, and civil treachery, because the Federation just herded the royal family into a cellar and shot the whole bunch of them, clad in pajamas and nightgowns and nothing about their persons more glittering than the occasional wedding ring or crucifix.   
Tenhxobre assumed that there would be a collector somewhere who would buy the regalia, and the jewels in the ponderous crown and even the much smaller emeralds and pilaebrots and rubies and calharchas surrounding the Star of Machande would certainly repay the trouble of prying them out of their settings and selling them on. But Tenxhobre didn't think that Sleer would have the objectivity to treat priceless, irreplaceable jewels as just a source of untaxed cash, no more beautiful, unique, or sparkling than the average titanium suitcase filled with used hundred-credit notes. He suspected that Sleer still had the jewels, and would keep them near her at all times. She probably wouldn't be reckless enough to wear them anywhere but in front of her bedroom mirror but, from everything he'd ever heard of her, that was her favorite place in the 'Verse anyway.  
The Assistant Commissioner was about to fulfill his duty as a Federation official by summoning Central Security and expressing his suspicions. Then he thought that it would weaken his image by showing vulnerability, or rather by risking vulnerability if the jewels could not be recouped. Better far to wait for the cat to jump, so he would be able to claim the victory or dissociate himself from the fiasco. Then again, depending on which faction happened to be in ascendancy at the moment that Tenhxobre's name came up, the glory of catching Sleer red (and green, and purple, and prismatic opal)-handed might easily devolve into the life imprisonment (or worse) for having failed to prevent her stealing the jewels in the first place. He was also aware that Sleer was something of a one-woman budget cut: in her wake, the number of individuals requiring pension benefits often dropped precipitously.  
Therefore, following the Federation official's motto, "Meum habeo Jacobe, irrumateum te," he wrote up a series of notes in his worst handwriting, crumpled the acetates, and left them in the wastebasket for his confidential aide to find, appropriate, and sneak away to report to Central Security.  
21.  
(Many years earlier—the exact number is classified)  
Acacia Cheung encountered many of the same tactics as Katharina Minolta. She was born for intrigues, and her whispers were praised as a delicate low voice. When this made her so angry that she shouted herself hoarse, the praise was reiterated Eventually she decided that walking a step behind her father, her brothers, and then her husband, her eyes demurely downward, was as close as she would ever come to lurking in an alley. Her delicate touch with a poniard would come in handy slicing a layer cake. If some damn fool insisted that the sun was the moon, there was no point in standing knee-deep in mud to improve his astronomy.  
When an appropriate husband was found for her, Acacia, now Xiang, was able to use her commercial acumen to her husband's advantage. Acacia's mother-in-law had five daughters-in-law, enough conquered provinces for the map to run red.  
Acacia's homes, from her rooms in the family compound as a newlywed, to the tiny flat she and Gilbert shared when Ronnie was a baby, to the fifteen rooms of her current habitation, were scrubbed with a vengeance. She could show you dust in a handful of fear.  
Being a mother is a very responsible job: if anything goes wrong with the children, she's responsible, whether by failing to give her children a warm, loving base of stability, or by failing to discipline them out of their sins and deficiencies. To call a man a bastard or a son of a bitch firmly places the blame where it belongs.  
Ronnie, of course, was not even a delinquent, much less one of those serial killers whose ominous quietness is retrospectively diagnosed to the media. Gilbert was duly credited with Ronnie's intelligence, studiousness, and piety (filial and otherwise).  
The Xiangs, all of whom had stage whispers that could penetrate to the back row an arena, shook their heads and said that Acacia had given her husband only one son. This locution very nearly made Acacia smile. What, she wondered, did they think? That she had a trunkful of sons, or a hundred bamboo steamers full of them, but in lieu of giving them to her husband, she sold them out the back gate of the compound?   
Thirty years elapsed between Acacia Cheung's first step across the threshold, into the bottom of the family hierarchy, and Ronnie's letter announcing his engagement. He hadn't taken the trouble to ask permission, either because sons today lack all filial piety, what can you do? or because he knew it would be refused.   
It was worth the wait. As Ronnie and Kaylee's shuttle approached, Acacia put on the very newest line-for-line copy of Epinal fashion (size zero), and stood rock-steady on her four-inch heels. A very polished beast, her hour come round at last, vogued toward Bethlehem with a heavy book on her head.  
22.  
**TamoRex (TRX) 62 1/8, down 4; no blockbuster introductions in the pipeline**  
"Yes? Just spit it out," Commissioner Sleer said, waiting for the girl to stop bumbling and stuttering and say something meaningful. {{They keep sending me morons}} Sleer thought. {{Ginger-haired morons.}}  
Her adjutant glanced down demurely. Sleer wondered where, on this godforsaken rock, she had managed to find a tailor to turn the thick regulation serge into a garment that someone not only clung to every curve, but looked as if, just around the next corner, there would be a trick of light that would render it transparent. "It's about your last posting, ma'am," she said. "There's been a Wave. It seems that there's a, well, it can't be true, but they say there's a discrepancy. About the Regalia of Porphyr Major." She waited for Sleer to deliver some version of "I never borrowed the vase, it was cracked when you lent it to me, and it was fine when I gave it back."  
"Get back on the horn, tell them that the so-called Regalia were given to me, as a token of my love to the people. It is…they are…my property. I have every right to keep them, and in any event these humble tokens from my people are precious to me."  
{{They're precious to everyone else too}} Sleer's adjutant thought. She cast her mind back over her employment and marital histories (two phenomena that were not unconnected) and wondered if any of the nearby planets harbored a reliable fence—good fences make good neighbors!--and/or ex-husband. By and large she preferred to avoid the latter, although sometimes those ambulatory wallets offered escape routes, and sometimes scapegoats.   
An hour later, she returned, murmuring, "There's a man to see you, ma'am. He has an appointment." She left Sleer's office, went back to her desk, and adjusted the ventilator to hear more of the conversation within.  
{{This had better work}} Sleer thought. {{Because I don't want anyone to look too closely at the…appreciation…I garnered from my beloved people on Porphyr Major. In any event, I need some sort of accomplishment to move me back closer to….well, it needn't be what I was before. But closer to civilization, for Christ's sake. Somewhere they don't haggle over every little douceur or lagniappe or backhander.}} "So good of you to take the time to come here to make this presentation, Mr. Tam," she said. "Of course, I know your lovely wife…"  
"Regan," he said. "Naturally, on a matter of highest state security, I couldn't trust it to a subordinate." And for something this dicey, he didn't want to have to seek Board approval. A commonplace of sound-bite anthropology is that primitives choose a king for the summer. The king's strength and virility prefigure the fertility of the land. The simple people give their king the best of everything available to them. Then, all too quickly, a successor is chosen, and the old king (not so very old, of course, just a year older than the year before) is sacrificed, and buried beneath the land where his blood gushed out.  
The modern CEO cannot sneer at such primitive practices, because his own tenure is often even more fragile. It lasts only until the sacerdotal ministrations of the securities analysts condemn him to the stone altar where his blood will spurt—unless he can prove that he is beloved of the gods.  
Gabriel felt nostalgic for the days of peddling antibiotics and injectable contraceptives, when he didn't have to conceal the very fact of selling what he was selling. Still, when you had an expensively researched lung cancer drug that had already been a spectacular failure on the open market, you had to find some creative, outside-the-box uses for it, and just hope that there'd be something left over once you'd paid off everyone with a hand out.   
"Speaking of my wife," he said, reaching into his briefcase, "She selected this for you, Commissioner. She asked to be remembered to you. She said that you looked so lovely at the Celebration of Valor that she selected this for you. Rubies go so well with white satin…"   
It was quite true that Regan had selected the necklace and matching earrings, but she had picked them for herself, for a birthday long-enough ago that Gabriel hoped she wouldn't notice that it was missing from the bank vault. If she did, he hoped she would see reason about the need to….invest…the ruby parure. Sleer would certainly have preferred cash, but Gabriel couldn't raise enough to make it worth her while. He needed a major new government contract to get the stock price out of the doldrums. If he failed, then he'd be out on his ear, and the jewelry would be headed for the auction rooms anyway.   
Later, although not much later, he realized that, although his tongue didn't slip past calling her "Sleer" to land on the old, perilous name or title, it wasn't terribly prudent to admit that he knew anything at all about the Commissioner's past. If she hadn't…and he hadn't….there could have been fireworks.  
The adjutant returned, quickly sized up Gabriel Tam leaned forward spectacularly to pour coffee, and Sleer and Gabriel remained silent long enough to make it at least possible, although not really likely, that she was out of earshot. When the woman left, Gabriel cleared his throat. "The Pacification Program," he began. "It's a central part of the developmental strategy, of course. Ethical pharmaceuticals are central to the program. This product, when dispensed by medical laser, is fast-acting and safe."  
"What about personality changes?" Sleer asked. It would have been too humiliating to hold the report at arm's length, much less schedule anything so desperately middle-aged as a vision correction laser appointment, so she pretended not to have time to read through trivia.  
"That's not a concern, Commissioner," Gabriel said. "The drug in question merely suppresses inappropriate aggression caused by excessive adrenaline."  
"But can the treated population continue to work normally?" Sleer asked. "As you are aware, we have production quotas to meet."  
"Certainly," Gabriel said. "If anything, it reinforces the work ethic. So it's a win-win all around."  
23.  
"Permission to sit down and eat lunch with you, Major," Mal said.  
"Awww, Mal, don't be silly," Kaylee said. "'Course you're always welcome. And, even knowin' Zoe an' all, I don't know much about that old Army of yours but 'round here we don't stand much on ceremony."  
"Ma'am, yes ma'am!" Mal said.   
"Glad to be back?" Kaylee asked.  
Mal looked around the mess hall. "Chow's a lot better than the last time I joined up. Don't know if I can say the same about the cause. Last war, seemed like I had more say about it."  
"Never been in the army before, so I guess this all looks normal to me. Speaking of which, Mal, I gotta ask," Kaylee said, spreading mustard on her gallibar ham sandwich and then taking a gulp of sweet tea. "Thought I knew everybody on the ship pretty well. Never figured you for sly."   
For reasons not limited to being seriously outranked, Mal decided not to point out that Kaylee had the worst Slydar in the 'Verse. "Generally I mostly ain't, Kaylee. That war'n't no all-fired, no-holds-barred romance, Kerr 'n' me. But we're prideful men. Specially him. After that battle down here, last time we was in these parts, and after you set your feet down here on the dirt, the two of us hit a real, real low point. Ended up in a situation where we needed stuff we didn't have the firepower to take. We didn't want to think we was askin' the 'Verse for handouts. And I hope you never need to find this out, but when you don't want to be alone in the dark, the story you tell is it's to do stuff with the lights on."  
"But what were you off doin' with Avon, anyhow? Leavin' the Bible stuff aside, I don't think he's—your **friend**\--is a good person," Kaylee said. "Even leavin' to one side his near-to-dammit killin' the General."  
"There was reasons for that."  
"Everyone you'd ask'd say that. Even Niska."   
"I know that I sure ain't a good man, and I guess by some measures he's worse," Mal said. "Anyways, Avon would punch you in the nose for implyin' any virtues to him."  
"Then he's no gentleman."  
"That he ain't, Kaylee," Mal said, suddenly feeling hornier than on many instances when he'd been lying under the duvet right next to where Avon was not approving of pajamas. He patted Kaylee's hand, right below her wedding ring. "Conjure there ain't but two good men in this whole base, and you got one and 'Nara got the other. Which is lots of what set me off on that epical bender of mine."  
24.  
The Bjornstroms (Lieutenant Katrin and Sergeants Sven and Danilo) wanted to join the rebellion, but they had to take care of their ailing mother. Using the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that Blake thought was taking years off his life, they simply packed her up and took her along.   
At first Blake didn't see why he needed a secretary at all, but Inara pointed out to him that he didn't want to spend his time apportioning blame for dud ammunition, changing the brand of disinfectant in the janitors' closets, or sorting out the conflicting bookings in the Oleg Gan Community Room.   
At first he hadn't seen what he needed a CPA for either (other than to provide an eventual husband for Major Frye). Then he realized that, in pre-Atomic times, Earth was spared even worse atrocities by Rommel's running out of gas in the middle of the desert. An army marched not only on its stomach but on the bank balance that paid for rations and materiel.   
"Fru Bjornstrom," Blake said, "What is THAT MAN {{oh, very mature, Blake told himself}}—what is **Mister Avon** doing swanning about the construction site as if he owned the place?"  
"Well, General, I suppose because he's paying for the construction," Monika said.  
"And I don't suppose anybody was going to tell me?"   
"You've always been very…results-oriented," Monika told him. "When you approved the plans, you didn't ask about where the money was going to come from."  
From the personal point of view, the Battle of Gauda Prime had been a devastating disappointment to Blake. However, in the wider sense, it had been rather helpful. Not only did it count as a stunning—and well-publicized—rebel victory, it was the military equivalent of "publish and be damned." Once it was clear that the Federation knew where the base was, it was unnecessary to keep trying to hide it.   
The victory brought new volunteers streaming in—and made it possible to house at least some of them aboveground. The hospital, the armory, the weapons lab (where Dayna worked part-time), the command center, and the computer center would remain belowground, but construction was well underway for new barracks, additional married quarters (Blake rather shared Mal's opinion of intra-crew romances, but he wasn't able to effectually prevent them either), a separate building for the War College, and a fully-equipped gymnasium to replace the redolent spare room with its ill-assortment of free weights and sweat-spotted tatami.   
Blake also tended to look forward to the day when the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest (despite this, he liked King Ro, who had been his first influential ally, so even in fantasy he hoped that his colleague would find a way to escape to exile). So far, Blake had been able to stave off demands for a chapel by telling the petitioners to schedule services in spare moments when the Oleg Gan Community Room was not booked. But, especially as the population of the base burgeoned, he knew he was on a hiding to nowhere. He supposed that it would be better to make plans for a modest chapel before Avon went and erected a replica of Chartres Cathedral behind his back. Major Ryori, who was an architect in civilian life, had quite a simple design for a prefab 25-foot cube, with plain walls that could be supplemented with holograms depicting the symbols of the major religions, and with a sliding track in the ceiling that could be used to screen off half the congregation from the other half should that be a creedal requirement.  
Fru Bjornstrom pressed the button on her desk that released the door to Blake's office. "You can go on in now, Dr. Tam," she said.   
"Yes, Doctor?" Blake said, knowing by experience that Simon had probably come to nag him about something, and hoping it wasn't his blood pressure. Even when the doctor was somewhere else, Blake could still feel the laser-like beams of those indigo eyes sizzling his clavicles. Great asteroids, what could the man expect when almost everyone—particularly those on Blake's own side—conspired to drive him mad?  
"Fresh vegetables," Simon said.  
"Too expensive, refrigerated shipping alone…"  
"As a start, we can certainly sprout seeds. Hydroponics. For that matter, I know this isn't exactly the Garden of Eden, but now that there are more above-ground operations, it would be possible to cultivate some of the land near the base…"  
"Many of our soldiers are Deltas, Doctor Tam. To be able to eat meat every day is an unparalleled luxury for them. In fact, I believe that Major Frye-Xiang was not used to it either, whether on Serenity or at her parents' home. It's part of the new world we're trying to build," Blake said. Perhaps farming wasn't a bad idea, though. There was inevitably a lot of downtime on the base, and something had to be done to keep up discipline and prevent slacking after the grounds had been policed and all the metalwork polished. Dayna Mellanby and Captain AW gave classes on hand-reloading, which built unit cohesion and saved money on ammunition, but there was still much available time.  
The commlink chimed. Blake pressed the button. "Yes, Roj Blake here, or, as I like to think of myself, 'He who must be obeyed if you've nothing better to do." He listened for a moment, then looked up at Simon, who squinted as if he suspected Blake of rigging up the commlink just to get rid of him. "I'm sorry," Blake said, noisily shuffling the papers on his desk. "I really must get through these reports by ten."  
"How are the pills working out?" Simon asked Fru Bjornstrom on the way out.  
"Oh, I hate to complain, but sometimes I get the most awful indigestion," she said. Simon knitted his brow, willing himself to remember that. "For the next batch, I'll change the formulation of the binder," he said. "Maybe, uh, I hope, it'll work better." He wished that River was around, she was a better pharmacologist than he was—too!—but Pilot Officer Tam was off flying Cold Medevac after a ghastly mess of a battle in Sector Three. The shooting was over, nothing to do but gather up survivors who weren't able to advance or retreat under their own power, triage them, and fly them back to the hospital if they seemed likely to survive and benefit from treatment.  
Blake came out of his office, partially to check that Simon really had left, and said, "What's next, Fru Bjornstrom?" because, even though he usually remembered, he was always terrified that one day he wouldn't.  
"Propaganda Unit," she said. "Then Captain Xiang, from eleven to two. I'm sorry, General, but he was most pressing about needing three full hours. The Quartermaster is going to send over some sandwiches." (And, she didn't mention, some of the prized stock of Real Ale.) Then you'll simply have to go through your Document Boxes, you can't put it off any longer. Colonel Daviys at four, to brief you on the intelligence reports from Sector Eight."  
25.  
When Regan Svioboda was a little girl, there was only one Academy, with admission theoretically based on the results of the Eleven-Plus Exam. Theoretical, because if a well-connected Alpha family had a child whose peculiarities did not include stupidity or physical weakness, then somehow admission could be arranged even if the test scores weren't quite there.   
There is still only one Academy, but now it has branches on several planets. Now it can be more than a simple spectator in the genetic lottery of its students. The students always strive to be their best, of course. Results are no longer left to their imprecise will power, when genes and chemistry can be manipulated. And for the elite of the elite, the Parliamentary Operatives, they have the very highest honor of all, of being so covert as to vanish entirely, black holes into which souls implode.  
26.  
Generalissimo Besuki nodded, and her mutoid pilot (spoils of war; captured and reprogrammed) locked in to the communications frequency and began the descent. After the admirably soft landing, the Generalissimo, resplendent in a midnight blue dress uniform with a pound of gold braid, climbed out of the flyer. A stocky young woman, barely tall enough to pass the standard physical exam, jumped out of the flyer, right behind her. The second woman's uniform, although steam-pressed every night, was not custom-tailored, and carried only a few badges and medallions.  
A soldier ran toward them, and both women's hands moved to the service weapons in their back-hip holsters. Then the runner's GP Base Camouflage Cap fell off, and a flood of dark blonde hair tumbled out, covering the Lieutenant's bars on her shoulder.  
"Soldier!" the Generalissimo said. "I can't believe that's a regulation haircut!" She shook her head, hoping it wasn't an indication of a broader slackness and lack of discipline.   
"Oh, mum!" Veron said, pulling a face, and then hugged her and buried her head on the Generalissimo's shoulder.  
Fru Bjornstrom saw this affecting scene on the security camera and buzzed the intercom. "Your eleven o'clock has landed, General," she said, then nodded. "Generalissimo, you may go in now. Good morning, Veron. Ah, Lieutenant."  
Blake rose to greet his visitor as she walked into his office, then did a double-take. "Welcome, Generalissimo Besuki. I see that rumours of your death were somewhat exaggerated."   
The former Colonel Kasabi nodded. "Of course, the Federated forces are honeycombed with traitors. So it wasn't hard to find one to inject me with a harmless sedative and stand over my body so no one could look too closely. Or one to smuggle out the body bag. After all, how do you think that there's always a flyer left around whenever one of your people needs to escape?"  
"I'm sure it cuts both ways," Blake said. "I daresay none of our words or actions can be deemed entirely confidential."   
"Well, I've got nothing to hide," Besuki said. "Have you? But, to get down to brass tacks…There's someone I've brought with me. Lieutenant Concepcion Villaruegas. She's waiting outside." (It took all of Fru Bjornstrom's persuasive tactics to get her to stand down, take a chair, and have a nice hot cup of tea and a digestive biscuit.) "She was recruited as a peasant girl from—I think it was Silmareno? Anyway, one of those places with two names. Her people were miners. Dirt poor. They die young, of course. Blake, I'd like you to admit her on secondment to your War College. With the right training, I think she could attain flag rank. And commanders like her could be the deciding force in the battles that put us over the top."  
"How's her Standard? Her Mandarin?"  
"Better than yours, probably, although they're her third and fourth languages."  
"Well, you see, we can't be doing with interpreters and additional classes at the War College, we have to get our officers up to speed…" Then an evil gleam came into Blake's eyes. "It's more blessed to give than receive, they say. Well, I'll swap you. I'm helping you out with your problem, you help me out with mine. I'll assign Captain Tarrant to you on secondment in exchange…"  
"Blake, you're not helping me with a problem, you're furthering the broader interests of the cause we both serve. My operation is not a dumping ground for….well, I hardly know what to call him."  
"How about, a superb, FSA-trained pilot?" Blake said blandly. (He suspected that Cauder wanted to get rid of Ronnie Xiang because Cauder had no patience for hotshots who wanted to win a war flying a desk.) "And the…personal awkwardness…between the two of us would not apply if he were transferred to another command."   
27.  
Cinnamon tapped on the door. When there was no response, she said, "There's been a delivery, Commissioner."  
Sleer frowned. She wasn't expecting anything, and although sometimes she gave a tinkling laugh and said she adored surprises, she certainly preferred rare orchids to pipe bombs. She opened her office door part-way.   
"Dear God, what are those?" she said, looking at the piles of rough wooden crates.  
"I don't know, Commissioner, but we have a lot of them." She was going to say, "What are we going to do with all the This Side Up?" but didn't think it would be appreciated. She did say, "Look through the slots. It's a whole lot of pill bottles." She poked gingerly at a packing slip. "It says 'Pylene-50 (Paxilon-G Hydrochloride)," Cinnamon said. "Uhh, what do we do with all of this stuff?" She tried to think if it had any street value, and concluded that it probably didn't because she had never heard of it and she didn't think there could be a whole new kind of dope that she hadn't even heard about.   
"Have the Bomb Squad test all the crates, and if it's all right, then deploy it," Sleer said. "It's supposed to be administered to the general population."  
"What do we do with it, ma'am?" Cinnamon asked, thinking that the problem would probably solve itself if they could just leave the crates near the loading dock with a couple of conspicuously fat and slovenly guards who took frequent and theatrical tea-breaks.  
"Oh, must I do **everything** around here?" Sleer sighed.   
"We look to you for inspiring leadership, ma'am."  
"I don't know. Tip out the bottles, run the stuff through a meat grinder, and dump it in the reservoir," Sleer said.   
Reminding herself to replenish her stock of bottled water, Cinnamon hurried to comply. She didn't watch very closely, because everyone knew that the troopers stole everything that wasn't nailed down. So she didn't know that, amid the bottles of pills that went astray, and were sold or swallowed or snorted just for the hell of it after the glue and paint ran out, one bottle was smuggled out to a Resistance contact.  
28.  
Inara, perched behind a screen borrowed from the hospital wing, fumed. She had put on her best sari and her finest jewels. Blake gave a fond glance at her midriff, then silently draped the loose end of the sari over her hair, and topped off the ensemble with a camouflage jacket. "I preferred the previous general," Inara told Blake.  
General Marrth was already furious enough to get on his high horse, or more precisely his poorly maintained obsolete spaceship, and stalk off. He didn't want to talk to a woman, and the mere suggestion that he do so was an insult. Inara didn't want to talk to General Marrth, but he didn't speak much Standard, nobody else on the base spoke Watalsch, and Blake very, very much wanted the services of the fabled Watal guerilla fighters. General Marrth wanted supplies, and modern medical treatment for his numerous wounded soldiers, but above all what he wanted was weapons. Those, especially the new M(ellanby)-102 projectile/pulse shortstock, were available for the quid pro quo.  
Marrth also wanted to leave Blake a present. In his ship, now docked in the hangar, was a tiny colony of war widows and the young children of fallen heroes (and fallen appleseed fever cases, and fallen heart attack victims, and those who imprudently operated oxcarts while intoxicated….) Until such time as the widows' hands were sought in marriage, or until their sons-in-law decided to offer them a place at the hearth, General Marrth thought they might as well be out of harm's way at Gauda Prime Base.  
Inara forced herself to remain calm, and to seek out the word that was most flattering, or least contentious, or most likely to bring both sides to agreement, striving to keep her voice gentle and coaxing. Much of the time, she had to translate words that existed in only one of the languages. She wouldn't describe herself as fluent in Watalsch, When she had spoken it before, the most useful phrases tended to be "What an exquisite display of gloxpiccia orchids" and "I am honored by your condescension. Please contact the Guild representative to deposit an additional thousand credits." And if General Marrth were to take a stroll outside the base and be devoured by a Black Doom, she would accept his loss philosophically.  
Still, she knew why Blake wanted to do business with this abscess on the gum of humanity, so she put an extra measure of honey and music into her voice and tried to make the deal go through.  
29.  
Lieutenant Villaruegas couldn't quite damp down the grin that pulled at the corners of her mouth. Modestly, she had tried to disavow the honor that her comrades bestowed upon her, but they would not be gainsaid. Connie, and no one else, would be the Group D delegate to the Political Committee, even though she was the newest arrival.  
She opened the door to the conference room, a little abashed by being the fourth and last delegate to arrive. But she checked her wristchron: she was on time. Just.  
"What are you doing here?" burst from her lips just as General Blake said the same thing.  
"I'm the Group B Delegate," Mal said. "We got papers for this thing? Or drinks?"  
"Yes, I surmised as much, Lieutenant Reynolds, but how…" Blake said.  
"Sir!" Mal said. "Drew to an inside straight, sir!" And for once he missed Jayne, who could probably have been bamboozled into stealing PolitCom from the pile of chores.  
The agenda wended its inexorable way. "Perhaps," Blake said, "We could use this Reaver situation as an entering wedge for persuasion. Suggest that our garrisons could offer protection…"  
"Protection, against a myth?" asked Captain Denbeigh, the Group A delegate. "Well, I suppose that could be a matter for the Propaganda Unit."  
Mal shook his head. "Reavers are no myth. I seen 'em, General." (Villaruegas crossed herself.) "Well, flashes of 'em goin' by, thank G….uh, luckily. But I seen what they did. Ain't no way to protect no one when they come on you. My merc—that'd be your big game hunter, General—after they flew by us, he said that he took his favorite sawed-off and put just one shell in it, for his own head if they didn't fly on by. He ain't a man that's easily scared, but he says his hands was shakin' when he loaded up."  
"Not a myth, then, but…perhaps, this talk of Reavers is exaggerated?" Blake said. "After all, it's hard to imagine murderous…ghouls…wandering the skies in unshielded over-burning ships, as careless of mutilating themselves as their victims."  
"If that's true, then the problem could be self-limiting," Denbeigh said.  
"But in modern days," Villaruegas said, "The knowledge of spacecraft is as ingrained as the knowledge of farming once was. Even a madman who has flown a flyer or a shuttle his whole life will remember what once he did in his saner days. Although he will not be able to direct his ship wisely, and perhaps he will land in one place and wreak havoc there when he meant to go to a different place."  
"Perhaps it's just another experiment," said the Group C delegate, Lieutenant Tharboe. "Don't forget the Crimos, General. There's really no one that the Alliance doesn't consider expendable. They've recruited psychopaths before. And, Lieutenant Reynolds, as your young friend Pilot Officer Tam could testify, they're not shy about tampering with the human brain either."   
Mal shook his head. "Wish I could tell myself that all they did was empty out the lunatic wards, maybe hop 'em up on Drops or Shadow. But I seen what I seen. If it didn't make me twist myself all up explainin' there ain't such a thing as Holy, I'd have to say that…Reavers's Unholy."  
Fru Bjornstrom tapped on the door. "It's three p.m., General." The delegates stood up to leave.   
"Villaruegas, Reynolds, stay behind after the meeting," Blake said. "Your orders are being cut now, for a joint mission."   
Every day, a bushel of petitions landed on Blake's desk, reminding him of what he'd read about letters sent to Santa Claus at the North Pole. And, just as some of those got answered thanks to charitable impulses of citizens, occasionally Blake selected a wish to grant. It was not quite a cake run for the two new lieutenants, but it was both a worthwhile objective and a chance for them to show their merits and how they worked together.  
"At ease," Blake said. Villaruegas looked a little rueful about complying. In the presence of the great leader of the Revolution, she would rather have been standing on a bed of nails than on a strip of very worn sisal matting.   
"You're familiar with the work of Raoul Tschevchenko, of course," Blake said, overlapping with one eager "Certainly, General!" and a drawl of "Hells, no."   
"Lieutenant Villaruegas, if you would be kind enough to brief Lieutenant Reynolds."   
"Raoul Tschevchenko was the ideologue for the Neo-Post-Marxist Party of St. Albans," Villaruegas said hurriedly, afraid to bore her audience by stating the grossly obvious. "In addition to several treatises that are still being debated throughout the Free World…" (Mal's eyebrow suggested that there wasn't a whole helluva lot of **that**) "He has also written a number of pamphlets that are accessible to even persons who have been deprived of formal education. Broadly-based communications are….is….uh, are….vital to unleashing the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Tschevchenko bravely gave many speeches and made many Cortecasts, without care for his personal safety. For several years, he has been under house arrest."  
"Thank you, Lieutenant, that is an excellent and very exact statement," Blake said. "Or rather, it was very exact until quite recently. Intelligence suggests that Tschevchenko is going to be taken from the comparatively merciful conditions of his confinement, and sent to Havenford. Of course, the fact that Havenford is escape-proof is comparatively irrelevant given the severity of the conditions of confinement. One could not expect Tschevchenko, who is elderly and not in the best health, to survive more than a few months. So we've decided to stage a rescue. Before he can be taken away from St. Alban's, we'll take him first. The plan has been conveyed to the resistance there, and he will be awaiting you. Escort him to your flyer and bring him here to the base. He'll be welcome to sanctuary here as long as he likes, or if he wants to move on to a neutral planet, we'll provide him with safe passage."  
30.  
"You're sure those Walnut gals can have candy? It ain't against their religion?" Kaylee asked.   
Inara sighed. She couldn't fault Kaylee on her charitable intentions, but Inara herself was very, very busy and didn't have much time for other people's pet projects. "A great deal is," Inara said. "But sweets are allowed. Well, except during the Term of Preparation before the Greater and Lesser Feasts, but I checked the calendar and this isn't."  
Inara knocked on the door of the Watal house. "I am Miss Serra calling upon you," she said. "Mrs. Xiang is with me. She wants to meet you. To be your friend." There was a murmur, and the door opened. When the Senior Wife saw that their visitors were women (Kaylee's coveralls required analysis), she clapped her hands, and her seven compatriots reached down to chin level and flipped the black net veils back over their bonnets.   
"Brought you some candy," Kaylee said. "A present of food from Mrs. Xiang to show goodwill," Inara said. "The food consists of pleasant sweet things with little nutritional value."   
Kaylee (a little puzzled by the comparative length of her statement and the translation) opened the heart-shaped box, and hurriedly ate a peppermint cream. That was being kind of a Lilacker-giver, but she didn't want them to think that it was poison. After a moment's hesitation—the candy sold in the Commissary truly wasn't worth the calories—Inara ate a caramel.   
The Senior Wife clasped each hand on the opposite wrist and bowed her head. After she straightened up, she selected a chocolate from the very middle of the box. The other widows lined up behind her and waited to be handed a treat.   
"Young'uns too, if that's all right," Kaylee said. "I'd love to meet 'em."  
After another colloquy ("Despite Mrs. Xiang's youth, I have been acquainted with her for some years and do not believe that she wishes to abduct your children and sell them to brothels") two almost-adult girls and nine small children appeared quietly from the sleeping room.   
"Bedamn if it ain't like a clown car," Kaylee said. Inara recognized that this was not intended for translation.   
After about twenty minutes, as even Inara's storied patience frayed, and Kaylee got a headache trying to remember which little girl was Thowwab and which was Errhzeil and which thing that sounded like a tiger after a frat party meant "Good morning" and which one meant "I am well, praise the Lord," they bowed and left their puzzled hosts.  
"Inara, it ain't right to keep 'em all cooped up like this, windows not but a foot square and all covered up anyhows."  
"It's their choice, Kaylee," Inara said. "They're very far from home…"  
"That's my point right there!"  
"…and the women are all widows. That means that they are forbidden to go anywhere they can be seen by an unrelated male, without the chaperonage of a senior male of their lineage or a priest or monk. None of whom can be found for hundreds of thousands of spatials. In essence, the women are stuck—well, they think of themselves as stuck—in that house until someone comes to fetch them."  
"What's the difference between that and bein' in jail?"  
"I don't know," Inara said. "The satisfaction of knowing that they haven't done anything wrong, I suppose. The hope of Heaven. Anyway, you've never been to Watalwald. I assure you, they haven't any more freedom there."  
"Tell me again why those folks are on our side?"  
"Because they're very good at holding a grudge." Inara looked around the landscape of the base, which was beginning to sprout an ugly building here and there among the trees and in the clearings. "By now, the base is far too large for me to know everyone in it, but I almost feel as if I did. And whenever we must fight, when we can't avoid a battle, the more it can be fought by disagreeable strangers and not by my friends, the better I like it."  
31.  
Lieutenant Villaruegas, having ascertained that clinic hours were over and hospital rounds had been completed, went into the storeroom, where Simon was scrubbing out and thinking about putting on clean clothes and heading over to the Mess Hall.   
In light of the nameplate on her cammies, she didn't think it was necessary to introduce herself, so she briskly informed him that she needed a medical kit for a two-person mission. She handed him the gray metal box, embossed with a red cross on the cover, that came with the shuttle.   
"Of course," Simon said, and touched his index finger to the biometric lock Avon had just installed on the limited-issue drugs cabinet. "Uhh, where are you going and what are you going to be doing?"  
"I can't discuss that with a fucking **civilian **," Villaruegas said primly.   
"Well, it helps to know what you're going to need," Simon said. She nodded, acknowledging the point, and rattled off a list of wound care products, antiseptics, and painkillers.  
As Simon re-stocked the kit, Villaruegas looked around the storeroom. "It's unusual that you would end up…here…after a life of opulence and privilege," she said. "I don't expect to see members of the oligarchy working on behalf of the people."  
"That might be true if I were nothing but my father's son," Simon said. "But I'm not just a doctor, I'm a surgeon. I mean, for years on end…for most of my adult life, really…even though I could have afforded a banquet every night, and I owned a beautiful apartment, I never got to sit down and eat, and I didn't get to sleep in my beautiful apartment—mostly didn't get to sleep anywhere. We used to say that a slaveowner would have to be crazy to make his slaves work the kind of hours that a house officer does, because he has an investment in the slaves and it's stupid to kill them."  
"That was not correct," Villaruegas said. "To make jokes about the oppression of others."  
"I suppose it isn't," he said. "But there's always a lot of, what you'd call, uh, gallows humor." He took a fresh set of scrubs from the shelf, ducked behind a curtain, and said (muffled a little by one ascending and one descending shirt). "Finding something to laugh at, even when it's grim. We—surgeons—do that a lot, too. Most of us just bitched about it, but there were two people in my class who spearheaded the rebellion against conditions. One of them, Anjanette, I think her name was Coorbin…used to get up petitions and threaten to call the house officers out on strike. I heard she spends about half her time as a Parliamentary Deputy. The other half under house arrest." (Villaruegas took a small pad out of the thigh pocket on her cammies, and wrote down the name.)   
"The other one, Kelly Ostrander, hired his kid brother to go to the Night Market on his bicycle and bring us food from the noodle stalls at three a.m. Last I heard, the kid decided not to go to MedAcad. He and Kelly own a chain of nursing homes. Anyway, there are plenty of people here who used to be rich, or at least comfortable. The General wasn't a poor man." He emerged, and put his dirty clothes in the laundry bin. "Anyway, it's the ones up on top of the heap who have the habit of command. They—"(he saw her expression) "We, we're used to telling people do things, and they go off and do them. And, uh, there's a lot of effort put into trying to convince the people at the bottom that it's all hopeless and there's nothing they can do to change it, so optimism is a luxury good. Doesn't always work, of course."   
"No," Villaruegas said, and grinned at him. She tightened the straps holding down the items in the kit, and ran the zippers back and forth a few times to make sure they didn't stick. "Doctor, you've been here longer than I have, and you have often had the privilege of speaking personally with the General." (Simon tried not to giggle.) "Were you privy to any of the discussions about the design of the base? What I heard, is that when he first built the base, the General drew up a schema that would have included Bachelor Officers' Quarters. No doubt this reflected his experiences as an Alpha, and his absorption of values about the worth of social hierarchy. But he was prevailed upon to give everyone the same housing, irrespective of rank. Larger quarters for married people, but not larger on account of rank."  
"All that happened before I got here, so I don't know. But you don't mind being a Lieutenant, though, do you?" Simon asked. "I mean, being a Lieutenant instead of in the ranks, not being a Lieutenant instead of a Captain." She looked hard at him, and decided that it was a real question, he wanted to know, he wasn't getting at her.  
"It is wholesome for the broader strategies to be decided by the entire army, speaking through their Commissars," Villaruegas said. "But in the heat of battle, then orders must be given because there is no time to debate. And it is important to make sure that the selection of officers does not merely reflect the grading system that the Federation-Alliance has imposed on us. When we win….no, really it is historically inevitable…then to be sure, if I am still alive I will make this point often."  
Simon had an insight, a vague point of light in the dimness, about why the General didn't often seem happy to see him. He imagined himself telling this to Avon, and hearing that Avon had often felt that arguments with Tarrant had a certain Through the Looking Glass quality. Either he said it out loud or Villaruegas was a Reader, because her eyes widened, she looked into the small, square stainless steel mirror (badly scratched) and made a vague attempt to push the wisps of hair back into her chignon.   
"When I was very small, just learning my letters, you know? My mother was a cleaner in the home of a mining engineer. I realize now that there was no one to care for me, so she took me along. But she told me it was a trip to the museum, where I must be careful not to touch any of the beautiful things. Do you think it is bad to lie to children?"  
"Uhhh, no," Simon said. "Not if it makes them happy. Or, you know, if it keeps things from being impossible for the adults."  
"And there were books, even in the rooms of the children. One of them was a big book. It had the letters standing up on the cover, so you could feel them with your fingers if you were allowed to touch it. And do you know what the book was called?"  
Simon shook his head. "My sister probably would know, but my psi isn't very good."  
"It was called Lice in Wonderland," Villaruegas said. "And when I was a child, I spake as a child. I was frightened. I thought that the book was meant to tell me that the world is a terrifying place, that even in a wonderful land like that in-the-bookish one, there would be the lice that made us itch and have our hair all chopped off. Usually in the cold months, not in the hot months when it would have been a relief to have hair like boys. But then I grew up, and I realized how much that book shows us about the goodness of God."  
Simon started to say, "No, that's not what it's about at all, it's just a silly fantasy for children…" but he could see this was important to Villaruegas, and she didn't have anyone else to tell it to, so he kept his mouth shut.  
"Because, until we join the Communion of the Saints, we do not know what is in the mind of God. What this book says is that even the most bad place, the battlefield, the goolock, the stollock, that we think is the front parlor of Hell, to a louse it is wonderful. And God made the louse also."  
Simon thought that by that logic, God made the torturer also, but he didn't point that out either.  
32.  
Inara, towering over River (especially since Inara's hair was piled carelessly on top of her head, and River's, as usual, flowed down her back; Inara wore brocade mules with slender heels, River wore combat boots that were, this time, military issue), looked at the two of them in the mirror. She lifted River's hand gently and put it on her own throat. "Eurrrh," Inara said.  
"Eurg," River said.   
"It's…well…a **longer** sound, Inara said.   
A weekend spent poring over Thunardier's Fundamentals of Watalsch Grammar and Etymology, supplemented by a few vocabulary lists, had provided River with an excellent reading knowledge of Watalsch. However, since she had never heard it spoken, her accent left something to be desired.   
"I bet that they're the kind of people who create a language where it's easy to make 'dish sponge' sound like 'your father is a stinking sodomite,'" River said, trying again to master the crucial "rrrh" sound.  
"They really are," Inara said. "They're easier to offend than Mal on U-Day." She shook her head. "For the time being, our…clients…are united by their hatred for the Alliance. And, I must say, I wish that perfectly good words like 'Alliance' and 'Federation' hadn't been spoiled for us! But soon, whatever we choose to call ourselves, we'll find ourselves in a tower of Babel. A heavily armed tower of Babel."  
33.  
Villaruegas, looking uncomfortable in her one set of civvies (long, tiered muslin skirt; embroidered blouse with puffed sleeves and a drawstring neck, espadrilles), gazed through the shuttle's windshield as she looked for a place to land. "If that's what I think that is, this won't be as easy as we thought."  
Mal was glad for this affirmation that you didn't have to be him to come up with a plan that didn't work as advertised.   
According to the coordinates, that small house, azure paint flaking off its adobe façade, was the place where Tschevchenko was confined, and from when he was scheduled to be dragged off to durance vile. There was a small balcony, behind wrought-iron gates, on the second floor.   
If things had been…quieter…then the roof would have been just big enough to land the shuttle, come down on a folding ladder, climb through the window, and remove Tschevchenko and the two suitcases that he had been firmly warned were all his rescuers could take away with him. He had also been told to keep a low profile, notwithstanding which he was standing on the balcony. From the shuttle, it was impossible to tell what he was saying, but many impressively dramatic arm movements could be discerned. He had certainly managed to gather a crowd, consisting of perhaps three-quarters drably clad working people, and one-quarter black-clad troopers.   
"You know what we could use?" Villaruegas asked, her eyes lighting up beneath her formidable eyebrow (which, Mal had heard, was the sign of a werewolf, although he didn't think he really believed in stuff like that).  
Buffeted by déjà vu, Mal sighed, "Some grenades."  
"Yeah!" she said, showing more enthusiasm than he had seen her display since the last debate about Anarcho-Syndicalism that dragged out the PolitCom meeting until after the Mess Hall stopped serving dinner.  
Discovering that it was true, Mal said, "I'm not minded to kill more folks than we gotta. Looks like this here is a box of flash-bangs, though."  
34.  
Avon approached the head of the construction crew, tumbling the two chips in his hand (one credit chip, one carrying blueprints). "It's all perfectly straightforward," he said. "Ten percent bonus for early completion, as well."  
35.  
Villaruegas and Reynolds had parked the flyer about a kilometer away from Tschevchenko's house, in what was probably the market square, with the flashbangs packed into Villaruegas' backpack. She had a knife strapped to her thigh, which would probably be easier for her to reach than the pistol which, perforce, she had to carry in the backpack. Mal had his tucked into the back of his pants, concealed by a light blue parka that a member of the local Resistance had bought from a rag and bone stall.   
"You stay down here, I'll go up," Mal had said. "I'm the more tactful." Villaruegas had made a face at that, but nodded. She set off two of the flashbangs, and Mal rushed through the open wooden door of the little house, ran up the steps and out the window to the balcony, and grabbed Tschevchenko. "We're from Blake, we're here to save you," he said, lifting the elderly ideologue by the collar and the back of his belt, like a vacuum cleaner.   
Most of the crowd dispersed as soon as they could see and hear (although there were a few spectators who might dive into the fight on either side), so Villaruegas thought it was more prudent to knee one trooper in the balls, seize his truncheon, and crack another one across the back of the neck with the truncheon instead of even trying to shoot anyone. Two more troopers decided to investigate whether there were any more invaders….in the nearest tavern that they could reach at a dead run. Villaruegas did take a moment to confiscate the fallen troopers' weapons, partially to reduce the enemy's arsenal, partly as a souvenir, and also because she thought Dayna would be interested to see the competition. She knelt, fastened their hands with plastic cuffs, and looked up at the remnants of the crowd, holding a confiscated machine pistol. She cocked it loudly, told them to bugger off, and added simultaneous translation in three languages. She ran into the house, which was small enough for her to easily find Mal arguing with Tschevchenko, who was stuffing things into a very large suitcase.   
:"We gotta go, right…ten minutes ago," Mal said.   
"Oh," Tschevchenko said. "Tell the stewardess to sit on the suitcase. That'll make it close."  
"She's a lieutenant, just like me, and she can kick your ass," Mal said.   
:"I don't need you to take my part," Villaruegas said.   
Villaruegas sat down on the suitcase, which obediently closed beneath her haunches. "Nice knockers for a lieutenant," Tschevchenko said, with a leer that would probably have been hideous even if it had not displayed a small selection of crooked, yellowed teeth that reminded Villaruegas of the sparse produce at a late-autumn market at home. Villaruegas cleared her throat and linked a few pairs of plastic cuffs into a lariat that could be looped around the suitcase. It was evident that she had plenty more plastic cuffs where those came from.   
She flashed a glance at Mal, and looked down, willing him to realize that the troopers might be up and stirring at any moment.  
"OK, Grand-Dad," Mal said. "We're headin' out ma-shang. Go down the stairs, out the door, head flat north maybe a klik. I got your back."   
Villaruegas, thinking that perhaps a new treatise that would be read for centuries, picked up the large suitcase in one hand and two smaller suitcases in the other, and trotted down the street a few paces behind Mal. Once they got into the shuttle, Villaruegas dropped the suitcases with a thump, strapped Tschevchenko into a passenger bunk, and stowed the suitcases as Mal fastened the doors and ran through the checklist and ignited the engine for take-off. Villaruegas hustled into the co-pilot's seat and strapped in.  
"His revolutionary thought is very pure," Villaruegas said thoughtfully, gazing back at the rescued man and wishing that there had been some excuse to put him under with one of the 12-hour injector spansules supplied by Simon. But no, he was only sleeping, his thin white beard reminding her of her grandfather's fragile and porous sleep. Tschevchenko might awake at any moment, and resume his quest to grope the nearest protuberance of the Lieutenant. "But, as an individual…he's kind of a pain in the tlaxatl, isn't he?"  
"Well, Looey, reckon that's true of heroes when you get up close," Mal said.  
"There are true heroes. We see the General every day. Your cynicism does you no credit," she said.  
"Kept me alive, though."  
"But if you believe in nothing, what is the advantage of that, beyond sheer entropy?"

"I'm guessin' that this is a sales pitch not just for the general concept of belief, but whatever you happen to personally believe in?" Mal asked. {{What is it, the full moon? They all get instructions through their tooth fillings?}}  
"Yes," she said. "It is a great sorrow to me to have to live where there is no priest. Pilot Officer Tam has fixed up a Cortex feed so I can see the Mass celebrated, but it's not the same thing."  
"You always got stuff to get off your chest, huh?"

"In the sense you mean, certainly not, Lieutenant Reynolds. I am not always certain in my mind about the legitimacy of taking the lives I have taken, even in battle. But not sins of a sexual nature. There are clear lines of right and wrong. God has given us the gift of the Marriage Act so it can be rightly used, not…scattered about frivolously."  
"The beast awakens," Mal said. "No, not my john thomas, our payload." A wavering bleat of "Hey!" from the passenger compartment buttressed this statement.  
Villaruegas sighed, told Mal to take the helm, and went to see if their illustrious guest required food, drink, travel sickness pills, or reading material. Standing carefully offside, she brought him a Self-Preparing Military Meal, a bottle of mineral water, and got him to autograph her copy of "Why Are the Rim Planets Poor?". Then he reached into the pocket of his tunic, withdrew a hand-held game console and resumed in the middle of a game that sounded loud and tinny even outside his earphones. He winked at her, which she ignored.  
Out of habit, Villaruegas checked all of the dials when she got back to the cockpit of the shuttle. Mal caught her doing it and scowled. "Ain't killed us yet, Looey."  
"Only takes the once, Lieutenant Reynolds."   
"Fine, you take the yoke then." He got up, stretched, and cracked his knuckles.   
"What is your class origin, Lieutenant?" she asked brightly. "Mine is proletarian, of course."  
"Hard to fit it into a box, which I guess is the definition of your real life anyhow," Mal said. "I mean, I grew up on Shadow, and if you owned it and Hell, you'd rent out Shadow and live in Hell. My Mama owned a bunch of land to run cattle on, which meant the land warn't up to much else, and you could say she owned it but it was the bank that held the note. It was Mama that gave the orders, 'cept that on Shadow, most ever'body figured she didn't know doodly-squat about shi…about Much Ado…just 'cause of bein' a woman. And she was the one that gave the orders, and also the one that wrote the checks. For the hands' pay, and feed, and irrigation water, and vet bills, and propane to heat the bunkhouse, and taxes and the other protection rackets."  
"My parents would have been glad of such an opportunity. They were always acting under orders."  
"They passed, your folks?"  
Villaruegas nodded.   
"Sorry," Mal said.  
:"And yours?"  
"My Mama, I know about, 'cause of when Shadow…well, you know. My father wasn't ever much of a presence, so if he was still on Shadow, then him too. Otherwise, I don't know. Wouldn't have to be older'n' Methusaleh, so he might not have died natural yet. If I'm like him, might have got the wrong side of a bullet, some time. From an army man or a law man."  
Villaruegas gave another, briefer nod to show solidarity.  
Mal put on an elaborate performance of casualness. "Well. Now that we're cryin' into our beer, we could go get some. Hear tell they spin some mp90s in the Ogre on Thursday nights," he said. "Are you off duty this Thursday?"  
:"You could have ascertained that from the duty rosters," Villaruegas said.  
"Yeah, well, I did, but I figured it was only polite to circle 'round the topic a few times like a sleepy tickhound. So, wanna go to the hop?"  
"I haven't ruled the possibility out completely," Villaruegas said. "At least I know I'd be safe with you."   
"Of course," Mal said unctuously. "Hey—no—wait! 'Course you wouldn't be."  
"Because you're…" she said, sending her wrist on a lively sine curve.  
"I don't know where you get your intel from, and I anyway ain't," he said. "And why shouldn't I be, if I was gonna?"  
"Holy Church says it's not natural. And everybody knows that you formerly cohabited with that Avon person, who is not only a very mediocre assassin but is a…you couldn't call him a skirt-chaser, I suppose. A pants-chaser. And he caught yours."  
"And I pulled 'em practically right out again in a minute! Anyway, dunno why you're throwin' it in my teeth, and you don't mind Simon livin' with him, what with it bein' same man both times."  
"The Doctor does a great deal of good, even though he leads an immoral life," Villaruegas said. "And in any case, he is not a Christian, so what can one expect?"  
36.  
The last day of the quarter, Kaylee joined the line of people at the firing range getting their qualification. As usual, Kaylee missed the target entirely with most of her shots, even with long weapons. And, as usual, Gunnery Sergeant Mahmuddi flagrantly lied and recorded a minimally passing score, because she liked Kaylee and nobody wanted her pulled away from the Motor Pool where she worked daily miracles.   
"You made a liar of me again, Foxy," she said. At the next lane, there were four stately "Blam"s followed by five quicker Blams, a moment's break, then nine very rapid shots.   
"I just hate guns," Kaylee said.  
"That's the Doc over in the next lane," the gunny said. "He doesn't like guns either, but he's a **good** shot. He's not even in the Army, come to think on it. But he comes in here at least once a month to keep up his skills. Try to learn to shoot, okay?" Mahmuddi said. Kaylee went to the sink and washed her hands, where she was joined by Simon, who not only got there later but habitually took seven minutes to wash his hands, sometimes to the detriment of the local water supply.  
"Oh, hi, Simon," Kaylee said. "Whatcha doin'?"

"Wash and River and I are heading out to Hawk Creek to run hot medevac," Simon said. "I'll probably have my hands full, as Zoe said, taking the bullets out instead of putting them in, but I'd like to be prepared just in case. And Kerr never carries a gun since, well, you know, so one of us should." He dried his hands, put on his jacket, and started to leave the firing range. Kaylee stopped him with a gentle touch on his arm.  
"Simon, you ever think that it would have worked out, you and me?" Kaylee said.  
He shook his head. "I'm glad you met the right man for you. Anything between us…no, it wouldn't have worked. We have nothing in common," Simon said.   
"Yeah? That's all you know, Simon Tam," Kaylee said. "Both of us loved a girl that everyone else counted off as just nothin', 'cause she was so broken, but we got her back on keel, over and over again, and now she's flyin' true."  
37.  
"This is so weird," Wash said. "Being here like this. Being back…but, not." He sat in Serenity's pilot seat (the ship had been re-christened _Nelson's Mandala_, but neither Wash nor River could be expected to take any notice of that), River in the co-pilot's, although the ship was on automatics and they didn't really to be there. But it would be too strange, sitting around the big wooden table, sharing it with strangers.   
This time around, instead of molded protein in the dining room, Wash and River had Self-Preparing Military Meals from Gauda Prime base. Wash pulled the ring that initiated the thermal sequence, waited a minute, then peeled back the foil, discovering Mashed Comminuted Fish Product Cake, Mac'n'Cheese, and Pineapple Gelatin. He craned his neck at River. She had Stewed Veniz, Mashed Taro, and Brownie.   
"Are you going to eat your brownie?" Wash asked hopefully. River, once again, rolled her eyes, just as she had when Wash, remembering where Jayne hid his Skocce, found some the third place he looked and initially posed a principled objection to sharing it with a youth.   
"In your dreams," River said. "Hey, wanna make the dinosaurs hump? C'mon, like you never did that."  
"My heart's not in it," Wash said.  
Battles, like dinosaurs, take a long time to die because of the long distance and poor communications between tail and brain, and Wash hadn't felt comfortable landing at the battleground. So they went to Plan B. River flew Shuttle One; Pilot Officer Koeleen Laesch flew Shuttle Two, both of which had been stripped down to accommodate four stretcher cases and a medic as well as the pilot.   
"Okay," Simon said, pale at the thought of losing some of his patients, and maybe losing some that could have been saved if he'd been better. "Send me up numbers One and…" (he looked around the former cargo bay, now filled with stretchers and IV poles and monitors) "…ummm, Seven."  
"Not One and Two?" Avon asked. Gauda Prime Base assigned only three pilots, one surgeon, one medical student, and five medics to the mission, but it hadn't occurred to anybody to tell Avon **not** to go, much less to do anything to actually prevent him. "The numbers are in order."   
The rebels fighting the Battle of Hawk Creek hadn't spoken much Standard, or any Mandarin, and nobody from GP spoke any Mevlemi, so the triage team on the ground used markers, or blood, or mud, or whatever was handy to scrawl numbers on the foreheads of the casualties who had been selected for transport.  
"Not that I owe you an explanation," Simon said (Avon winced), "But I'm going to have two tables going. I'll take the worst case, Mieko's going to take the not-so-worst case and I'll supervise." He pulled his gaze away from Avon, and shouted, "C'mon people, let's do it—we have lives to save."   
A few hours later, Simon looked at the read-out of the IV on his latest case, who wasn't in such bad shape comparatively, and shuddered in the horror a pre-visitation Scrooge would have shown at promiscuous distribution of geese to poor people.  
"Look, nurse, I know you don't want these soldiers…these people….to be in pain, but look at how much parmexion you're running in this drip!"  
"There's no fatal dose, and it'll be a happier ship all 'round if we keep 'em under 'till we get back to base, and anyhow we've got buckets of the stuff," said Rico, the Circulating Nurse. "Yer bloke gave me a barrelful. Straight up, a metal barrel. Helped me fill up the syringes, too. Don't you lot ever talk to each other?"  
When all the cases had been stabilized, Simon, after stumbling out of the WC with the look on his face of a man who had just won the lottery, crashed out cold in what had been River's old room. Lieutenant Kanozura crashed out cold in what had been Book's room. Kanozura, who was just Basic Training away from being a fourth-year medical student at the National Allopathic MedAcad of Beaumonde, discovered that day that it actually wasn't all that difficult amputating limbs, given an adequate supply of current for the various power tools, and there were a lot of places on the human body where bullets came right out if you tugged them. She was so grateful for these lessons that, as soon as she returned to Gauda Prime Base after the battle, she got herself transferred to Avalon's forces, where she thankfully accepted a commission as an artillery lieutenant.  
38.  
"Kaylee, get the hell out of here, you're making Zoe nervous," Mal said from the head of the bed, where he supported Zoe's shoulders. Zoe, with an effort, redirected her focus long enough to nod at Kaylee. "Could be awhile, Kaylee. Get on home to that husband o'yours."  
"Yes, sir!" Kaylee said (it took her most of the corridor to realize that she outranked him significantly), kissed Zoe on the forehead, and hurried out, a little shaken in her resolve to enhance the population of the base's crèche ASAP.  
Connie, whose training as a barefoot doctor included a fair amount of midwifery, said, "I don't think it will be long. After this contraction, put your arm 'round my shoulder and get up and walk around for a while."  
Two and a half hours later, Connie entered Victoria Blake Alleyne-Washburne's vital statistics on her hand-held computer, and told Zoe that the baby's Apgar scores were perfect  
"I miss Wash," Zoe said, sitting up to cradle the now-clean, swaddled baby in her arms. "I wish he was here."

"Well, you had a few pretty uncomplimentary things to say about him a while back," Mal said, watching the baby's fingers. "Anyway, he'll be back, quick as winkin'."  
39.  
Wash flashed River a ghastly smile. "I'm…well, I don't think I should be here in the first place. I should be with Zoe. And I told Blake that, and he told me that it's the bloody army, not the Teddy Bear's Picnic. And I got flashbacks to Mal attractively decorating the sick bay with my best shirt. While I was still wearing it. Because he told me to get in…well, in here, actually…and fly. When it looked like my Zoe was dying."  
"She knew you wouldn't go away from her willingly," River said. "Also, she's not going to die. She's going to be fine. She's strong and healthy and she has plenty of help."  
"Yeah, well, she doesn't have a **doctor**, 'cause he's right here." (And he never really forgave Simon for missing Zoe's delivery just like he missed Shepherd Book's near-exsanguination. In the latter case, Wash accepted attempted combustion as a partial excuse, but since Simon wasn't even in the army, Wash expected Simon to tell Blake to put the assignment where the monkey put the nuts.)  
Suddenly, River leaped up. "Get me plenty of clean sheets and hot water!" she shouted.  
"What…you can see what's happening at the base? It's starting? Our baby is starting?"  
River flashed him a devilish grin and sat back down. "No, I just want a cup of tea and then grab some racktime in the shuttle."   
River had been asleep for an hour and a half when Kaylee sneaked into the CenCom room and, contrary to Blake's explicit order, waved "Come home soonest. Real good news."   
Three of the hospital cases died before the ship reached GP. Two more died in the following week. Simon contemplated Waving the details as a supplement to his arrest warrant. Maybe they'd give him a medal instead.  
40.  
Lieutenant Ahearne, Blake's adjutant, unrolled the poster (Hardcopy, Situations Lacking Tarial or Cortex Access or Capture Technology, Suitable For) and pinned it to the display board   
Blake blinked. It was a sort of optical illusion, because it depicted a handsome young man in a Captain's full-dress uniform, standing with his hand on the shoulder of a pretty young woman clad in a modest dress of undyed homespun. The solemn girl sat at a rough table, with an open book in front of her. The young man looked proud. The caption was "Join the Rebellion, and your sister will read." The Captain and the maiden were played by Dr. and Pilot Officer Tam respectively, and Blake wondered how the Propaganda Unit had managed to get Simon into uniform even momentarily and fictitiously.  
"Very effective," Blake said.  
"It was Lieutenant Villaruegas' idea," Ahearne said. "She's very keen."  
41.  
Connie pulled at the drawstring of the bag she had crocheted out of a ball of string, some of it dipped in ink. She didn't really trust Brikkling to have delivered genuine goods, even though the price she paid was exorbitant. She took a breath to steady herself, knowing she had to act fast.   
One arm full of baby, she opened the tiny ampoule, and poured what she had to hope was really holy water onto the baby's forehead. "I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," she whispered, then dried the baby's forehead with her wrist. It could hardly be considered a baptism in extremis—the baby obviously glowed with lusty health—and Connie was glad that Zoe saw the sense of baptizing the baby, and of doing it before Wash could get back and object, but Connie was sad that there was no prospect of a genuine priest.  
Then she carried the baby to the chapel. Colonel Plunkett clicked on the projector, and the walls were decked in stained glass, and organ music sounded from the boombox. He said a prayer for the congregation, then a prayer of gratitude for Zoe's safe delivery, then asked, on Victoria's behalf, for renunciation of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.  
"I do renounce them," Connie said earnestly, echoed by Kaylee and Ronnie.  
Plunkett had given up even protesting that he was only the shell of a cleric, figuring that either the Hound of Heaven had caught up with him at last, or that he was merely throwing out life preservers to people who felt themselves drowning in a cold sea of petitions to God. If they needed help to worship, and they thought he was helping, even knowing what they knew, then he wasn't going to turn them away.  
42.  
Blake remembered that there had been days, or even more, aboard the Liberator when he had absolutely nothing to do, when they'd completed one mission and he hadn't located the next objective so it was too early to plan the next mission. But then, he had only a handful of people under his command, not thousands of them. Now, with twenty minutes between meetings, it was far too early for lunch, and he couldn't stand the sight of another cup of tea. He wandered over to the hospital wing.   
The front door was in the records room, which also contained a couple of lab benches. The hospital was deep inside the complex, so, in lieu of windows to the outside, the front wall was almost entirely made of glass bricks  
Blake blinked, unable to believe his eyes. Avon sat at one of the lab benches, his back to the door. Then Simon walked in. Blake froze: Simon's gloved hands were held up in the air, in front of him. Was Avon holding him hostage? Blake hastened his steps, putting his hand on the barrel of his sidearm, moving as fast as he could while keeping silent.  
Then he stopped dead. Simon bent over, his hands still raised, and leaned forward to kiss Avon. Blake couldn't help noticing that Avon was also wearing a set of scrubs that looked suspiciously identical to the ones in the stockroom.{{What, is that bastard helping himself to **everything** around here?}} Blake thought. No longer bothering to sneak around his own base, Blake walked through the swinging door to the hospital wing. Simon had moved away, removed his gloves, and was scrubbing up at the sink.  
"Avon, what the bleeding hell are you doing here?" Blake asked.  
"The morning labs," Avon said, gesturing at the small computer on the lab bench. "Simon's just finished a procedure…"  
"Ankle replacement on Sergeant Phelim," Simon said. "Kerr, put a note in her chart, that's her dominant foot, it's not an area where cosmetics are that important, but she may need more PT than if it had been the other foot…."  
"And he thinks he's going to do rounds right now, but he won't until after he's had a coffee and something to eat," Avon told Blake.   
"'He'?" Simon said. "He is the cat's mother….uhhh, father…."  
"Is that Orac?" Blake asked, then looked closer, and saw that it wasn't and was glad he hadn't made a fuss about Orac being commandeered.  
"No, it's Medora," Avon said. "Kaylee and I built it to handle the computing for the hospital." Simon started to blurt out that that was not a terribly accurate description; Kaylee had flat-out refused to work with Avon, so Simon made Avon draw the schematics, then Simon ferried them over to the Motor Pool for actual fabrication.  
43.  
"We got the place to ourselves now, baby," Jayne said. "What with Mal joinin' up, and now Avon packed his traps and moved out. He had 'em build a little house for him and Simon up near the northwest edge of the compound. Wanna christen that room all over again?"  
Dayna nodded and gave Jayne a smooch.   
"Simon's got him so whipped—prolly literally too—that if Simon said, hey, y'know what'd be hot? Me drivin' a ridin' mower through your liver, Avon would just go right out and steal him one."   
"You don't know Avon the way I do!" Dayna said. "He's no pushover, believe me."  
Jayne shook his head. "Don't I know it! Asked me for the rest of this month's rent back, and I knew he didn't need it and didn't even want it so much, just wouldn't let himself be done down, y'know? And I give it him."  
The new house was very small and square, with a very large roof built of four triangles (covered in solar panels) that pushed past the sides of the one room to form a veranda. There was a bed, of no great size, directly in the middle of the room. A counter along one wall held a two-burner stove, a small chill unit, a sink, a rice cooker, a toaster, and a microwave oven. There was a cubicle in the corner with a toilet, a sink, and an overhead shower that economically washed the floor alongside the cubicle's inhabitant. A counter along another wall held two computer/Cortex screens, and a small shelf of paper books was tacked overhead.   
It would have fit inside Simon's living room on Osiris—in fact, it would have fit inside any one of the maids' rooms in his parent's house—but he liked it a lot.  
44.  
Hearing stiletto heels tapping down the corridor, Cinnamon put the finishing touches on the artistic disorder, stuck the dart into her neck, threw the latex gloves into the wastebasket, pushed them down far enough not to show, flopped down on the floor, and timed her groans to reach a crescendo as the Commissioner opened the office door.   
"What the….?" Sleer breathed.  
"It's the Porphyresque Regalia!" Cinnamon said. "Look, the safe is open! After the thieves knocked me out with this dart…" (she pulled it out of her neck and brandished it evidentially) "they must have trashed everything, found the safe, and opened it!"  
"How could they open the safe?" Sleer said, keeping her hands on her hips and pointedly refusing to offer a hand up to her struggling attaché. "And who, precisely, are **they**?"  
"Well, everybody says that the rebels used to have a master criminal who could open anything," Cinnamon said, economically giving two answers at once.   
"A guerilla attack by rebels? But that's what I was going to say in case Central Security sent someone to investigate the…non-presence…of the Regalia back on Porphyr," Sleer said.  
"I can't help it if you're psychic," Cinnamon said, back on her feet at last, dusting herself off.   
For a moment, Sleer contemplated an increase in the verisimilitude of this extremely bald narrative, by shooting Cinnamon before reporting the robbery, but that would mean she'd have to do her own typing and filing until Personnel issued her a new PA. Better the devil you know.  
Sleer told Cinnamon to take the rest of the day off and go to the health clinic. Once the coast was clear, Sleer poured herself the first of several long green drinks. Eventually her normal sunny, or at any rate thermonuclear, optimism asserted itself. There might not ever be an investigation, and if there was, she didn't have to be around while it was being conducted; having four planets under her command gave her excuses for constant motion. She could not entirely believe that it was impossible to hit a moving target (although she had quite often seen the Federation's troopers fail to hit nearby stationary ones) but at least motion itself diverted her from her worries.  
45.  
"Oh, **damn**" Simon said, when his pager went off. "Sorry, baby," he said, and yanked at the end of the silk cord he was nowhere near finished elaborately knotting over Avon's torso. Simon was fully dressed, except for his socks and shoes, so he took a deep breath, willed his hard-on to deflate, and swept his pager off the bedside table.  
Avon slipped the rope encircling his hands off the hook looped over the headboard of their brass bed, and twisted the break-away knot open. (Break-away or not, the day when he couldn't untie his hands when they were right in front of him, hadn't come yet.) Avon headed for where he knew he could find his clothes. It was hardly the only advantage of involvement with Simon, but Avon appreciated that his clothes didn't just get flung hither and yon.  
Simon thumbed rapidly through a pack of index cards from the back pocket of his scrubs. "I feel like I've already thrown everything I have at Sergeant Smirkovskii, I don't want her drug-dependent but I don't want her hurting either…" he said, his eyebrows drawn in with much the same concentrated expression he had just worn when placing knots.   
"You have a kind heart," Avon said. "I'm trying very hard not to do what I do whenever I encounter something I don't understand—cut it apart to see how it works."  
"No different than yours," Simon said, scrubbing a hand through his hair and deciding there was no time to risk a goodbye kiss.   
"Oh, entirely different," Avon said. "Have you ever seen a pickled walnut?" Simon shook his head. "They're shriveled, and black, and salty. My father liked to eat them when he went down to the Zodiac and Compasses for a pint."  
"Ah," Simon said. "Peculiar bar snacks. Entirely comprehensible if you're drunk enough."  
"And are you?"  
"Yeah, I'm drunk enough," Simon said over his shoulder, heading toward the hospital.  
46.  
"Dunno why you're whispering," Mal said. "It's a Cortex link, after all. Y'ain't standin' on the corner lookin' over your shoulder 'case a Fed motors by."  
"This is a honey of a deal, Mal," Brikkling said. "Just the kind of thing you used to do. Well, except for the getting shot and not getting paid bit. Like taking candy from a baby, this. I'm supposed to be fencing for this amateur thief, this girl who says that her boss embezzled a whole dragon's cave full of jewels, and to cover it up, she was going to stage a phony robbery. The boss is, I mean. So the girl got there first with an even phonier robbery, so I'm going to pop in heroically and give her a hundredth of what the gear is worth. The stuff's hotter than a Geiger counter at a plutonium dog show, so it'll have to be broken up, but that just means she's been to every fence in the Sector and they won't touch it. Cute girl, too. World-class knockers. Looks like a right goer. Like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth but your plonker would. Dunno why I'm even thinking about it, even if I ask her to throw me one to seal the deal, I might not be able to go through with it. I think my wife's got detectives on me, to ratchet up the alimony."  
{{It can't be}} Mal thought. "Back up to the part where she's cute and got a big rack," he said.   
"Sounds like you met her before." (Mal started to say "Met her? Sounds like she's my wife" but, on further reflection, thought it would be embarrassing.) "Small world, innit? Short, sort of red hair, has a way of looking up at you and cooing like…"  
"Brikkling, I'm mighty grateful that you bore me in mind when you had some quality crime to do, but I ain't touchin' that," Mal said. "Leaving aside a little problem of either explainin' that I need leave to do some thievin' or goin' AWOL, I want to stay a sincere coupla planets away from that woman. You should, too."  
"Can't do it, Mal," Brikkling said. "This is just too sweet."  
"Too good to be true, more like it. Tell you one thing, though. That girl is no amateur at thievin' or anythin' else save bein' decent. Come to think of it, tell you two things. Whatever you do, don't let her kiss you."  
Maybe it was the moonlight, or maybe the near-beer in the OGCR had somehow been brewed up to full-mead standard, but Mal somehow found himself discussing this conversation with Connie, although in a somewhat edited form under which Jayne had been the undelighted bridegroom. That made it necessary for Mal to come up with a different lead-in to his feminist seminar on Serenity, but he was pleased with his improvisation.  
47.  
Simon finished his shift at the hospital and went back to the house. Avon wasn't there, so Simon considered taking an afternoon nap. The bed stretched square and inviting. But now it looked…well, a little large. And empty.   
Simon took his running shoes out of the shoe rack, grateful that he didn't have to run in army boots. He figured that he'd jog a couple of miles, come back for a shower, then head over to the OGCR to see who was hanging around.  
"Time to wake up," he said, and headed out the door toward the woods.  
48.  
"Well, General, they don't eat much, but they eat something," Captain Xiang said. "And personnel have to be deployed to bring over the food, take away the dishes, you know. And they must get awfully bored, sitting over there in that…harem…doing nothing."  
"'How can we sing the Lord's song, in a strange land?'" murmured Colonel Plunkett.  
"And we don't want to create a precedent for a welfare state," Ronnie continued. "Everyone here has…or, anyway, should have…some kind of work assignment. Except, well, once we have more children around…anyway."  
"I'm not opposed in principle to giving them work assignments," Blake said. "Although we do have to think about the security considerations on our side and the religious considerations on theirs. They aren't supposed to be seen by unrelated males, you know. If they stay here on a long-term basis, the children can go to school, they'll quickly pick up Standard, and be assimilated into our community, so that isn't a problem. But the grown women…" He poured some water from the carafe and took a sip. "From what I hear, Pilot Officer Tam has been most helpful in teaching basic Standard to the women and children. And, Major Frye-Xiang, you've been doing splendid work trying to contact the women and make them more comfortable. What say we assign them to the motor pool?"  
"Can't do it, General," Kaylee said. "Hell, none of 'em can so much as drive a mule. The fellas won't let 'em. If the toaster breaks down, they'd yell for some fella to fix it. If they had electrics to start with. Gettin' here musta been the first time any of 'em had so much as been in a spaceship."  
"Ah. The hospital, then. I'm sure you're constantly, or at any rate frequently, understaffed, Doctor."  
"General, I've been trying to get you to understand that nursing is a highly skilled profession, not a dumping ground for anyone on light duty," Simon said, with the asperity he usually displayed in committee meetings.  
"The kitchen," Blake said desperately.  
"I can use the help," Quartermaster Ferrara said. "But not if I have to…dig a tunnel…or put up canvas between the Mess Hall and their house, just so nobody sees 'em. Could we send over the cloth, the buttons, and so forth, and have them sew us some uniforms? I guess it doesn't signify if our soldiers wear their own underwear, but it looks slack if they're on patrol and we can't kit 'em out."  
49.  
"Thrown out of house and home," Avon said dramatically.   
"You did say that you wanted to refine Medora's scanning capacity," Simon said.   
"That's just 'cause she disagreed with you about Corporal Enchougou's chest film, so you figured she had to be wrong," River said. She turned to Simon. "C'mon, hurry up. I'm back on duty at 1600 hours."  
Simon smoothed out the Dardanella board It was a game that River invented when she was six. It was played with an ordnance map of Osiris, Northwest Sector 22, the Minor Arcana of a tarot deck, and an ordinary deck of cards (minus the fives and nines). Properly speaking, the game pieces should have been bottle caps, but milk was delivered to the Mess Hall in 50-liter drums with spigots. Simon fished some insulin vials out of the NonHazMat bin, and River painted the tops of half of them with a precious bottle of nail polish that Kaylee bought for her from Brikkling when Kaylee figured that maybe River could get a new fella faster if she spruced herself up a little.  
"Uh, I'm sorry that Tarrant got transferred," he told River.  
"Yehsooa, Simon, don't try to shine on a telepath," she said, reshuffling the cards in her hand. "Who dealt this shit?"  
"You did," Simon said, arranging the pink-topped vials into three rows of five and squaring off the edges. "Nice mouth there, soldier!"  
"I don't need it to kiss our mother with, do I? Anyway, I don't miss Del. He was…an experiment."  
"Then I'm glad he got transferred. I never liked him. He's such a dipthong," Simon said. (As children, he and River had been forbidden the more conventional items of bad language, so they evolved idiosyncratic dysphemisms.)   
River produced a pair of threes; Simon made a show of not checking, and River advanced two of her unpainted vials along the lake. "Simon, it's all right. If you're a special person, then some people want to use you, and some want to shoot you down. Just being a regular person **is** my conquest of Everest. Being…flat….is my ascent." She picked up a handful of vials, let them dangle between her inturned fingers, and touched her hand just beneath her shoulder. "These are my daily medals. Like Cornelia's jewels."  
50.  
"Thanks, honey," Brikkling said. "It's been a pleasure doing business with you." He handed her the briefcase full of bills, and gave the jewels in the velvet box another check with his electronic loupe. All kosher clobber. Then he tried to look like a mark as he waited for the sting to begin.  
Cinnamon wore a muslin peasant blouse with a low drawstring neck, naively embroidered with cross-stitch daisies. She also wore a very short skirt and a pair of espadrilles—no doubt representing the native dress of her humble natal planet. Brikkling appreciated the view, grateful for Mal's warning. Without it, his brain would probably already have taken itself off-line.  
Cinnamon drew a tremulous breath, which did nothing to further conceal the marvelous promontories that were, so to speak, scarcely veiled by wispy cloud cover. "There's something…oh, I'm so ashamed, I can't even talk about it…" and a fierce blush mantled her pale, round cheeks.   
Brikkling patted the sofa next to him. {{Here we go}} he thought. "Sit down. A nice girl like you, I'm sure you've got nothing to be ashamed of."  
She hunched down into the sofa, then tilted her chin up to look into his eyes. "I'm…I'm…too nice! Well, you see, I'm….I'm….a v…v…virgin. And I don't want to be. I want to be a real woman! I want to know how to pleasure a man! And I want you to be the man, because….you're…so gentle, yet so masterful!"  
"I'm deeply, deeply honored," he said. Cinnamon luged toward him, lips first. Brikkling kissed her on the forehead. "Now, now, dearie," he said. "That's an awfully intimate thing to do, and we hardly know each other. I mean, just being accomplices is no substitute for a proper introduction. So save that until you meet someone you really like, dong ma?" He gently patted her shoulder, then gently patted a little lower down. "My, this is quite the pretty set of pigeons," he said. He dropped his head into the valley revealed by her blouse.   
"Half a tick, darlin'," he said, hoisting the jewel case. Luckily, the downstairs safe was close to the downstairs powder room. Stowing the jewels and re-setting the combination took only a few seconds, as did palming a handful of extra-strong condoms from the medicine cabinet. Just in case, he put on a thick coat of lip balm.  
"What's that on your mouth?" she asked sharply.  
"Wouldn't want chapped lips on a tender bit, now would you?" He sat down, pulling Cinnamon into his embrace, facing away from him with her head on his shoulder. She tried to turn around, but somehow couldn't quite unlatch his arm.   
"Now, if you really want to show a fella a good time, here's what you do. A lot safer for you than the old how's-your-father, too. We'd better save that for the next lesson, when you're fixed up and won't fall pregnant. Here, scoot on down toward the end of the sofa, I'm going to lie down." He snapped his fingers, and the lights lowered seductively. He unbuttoned his fly, pressed the self-opening strip on the condom packet, and rolled it into place.  
"Oh, my God," she said. "Why is your, uh, well, you know, **thing**, why is it that color? Shouldn't it be the same color as the rest of you?"  
"Not that mine's got anything to be embarrassed about, but they do blush a bit. But this here's banana flavor," he reassured her. "Wait'll you see the guzelberry flavored ones. Or the sort with sequins on"   
Cinnamon tried to rearrange her features to add a façade of innocent seductiveness over the landscape of sheer loathing.   
{{Suppose this has gone far enough for a joke}} Brikkling thought. {{Anyway, if I go through with it and Sorbette finds out, that'll add zeroes to the property settlement. Which would be far too much to pay even for Blake's Companion totty, much less this girl.}}  
"Don't like the look of it, eh? he said. "It is a lot for a young girl to take in at once, I admit. All right, then, off you go! Better let yourself out. Don't forget your bag of dosh, darling!" Unable to think of anything else to do, Cinnamon hoisted the briefcase and left. She consoled herself that it wasn't a total loss. She had counted the bundles, and riffled through enough of them to see that there was a substantial sum of cash in there.   
As soon as she passed the radius of the security cameras, she was felled by a fist to the jaw.   
It wasn't much of a fight—Cinnamon scrambled up, tried for a back-heel strike but found herself kicking air—and it broke up as first whoop of the cop car siren and the first flare of its lights dispersed the combatants and the excited spectators. The private eye, perched on a balcony across the street, snapped a few telephoto shots but neither the PI nor the second Mrs. Brikkling could figure out their significance.  
However, the brisk, confusing affray did give Connie enough time to switch the briefcases, rush upstairs and give Brikkling the money and get the jewels, then hurry for the spaceport before her 24-hour pass expired.  
51.  
When he didn't have time to go to the base gym, or even if he did, Simon made a point of working out at home. Some stretches, his tai chi form or at least the Twelve Precious Gestures. And one-armed push-ups, because they never failed to drive Avon crazy.   
Maximum effect was obtained when he exercised wearing his sleep pants but omitting his t-shirt, although he sometimes slacked off, because the tatami mats were scratchy.   
The strongest therapeutic effect was obtained when working out ten minutes before it was time to leave for his work shift at the hospital.  
52.  
Colonel Daviys (Intelligence) reported on the chatter traffic. It suggested some difficulties with a drug-based Pacification program out in Sector Six.   
"Another one?" Blake said, remembering the vacant eyes of heavily-drugged citizens in the few Domes that were the only inhabited parts in the devasted landscape of Earth-that-Was.. "Dear God, they must rattle when they walk."   
"Well, General, shall we assign some personnel to it?" Major Naylor asked.  
Blake looked at the corner of the room, up near the picture rail, squinted, and said, "I don't think so. We're heavily committed to the attack on Winterreise."  
Orac's lights began to flash. "Commitment of your ground troops is unnecessary in this context!" it said. "Artillery attacks, supplemented by raids by the Watal guerillas, will be sufficient to undermine the already precarious Federation hold on the position."  
Daviys and Naylor weren't entirely sure where Orac fit in the chain of command, and if they had really disagreed with the recommendation, they would have protested against taking orders from   
53.  
Kaylee went to the women's compound to bring over more cut-out fabric and take away the freshly sewn and ironed uniforms. Inara was far too sophisticated to roll her eyes, but weeks earlier, she made known her impatience with teaching the Watal women how to use sewing machines and electric irons. Kaylee was willing enough, but she couldn't do a thing with a sewing machine except mend it when it was broken. Ferrara, who had been a Home Economics teacher on Whitefall, had to go over and give lessons, with River as interpreter, although the Watal women found her accent so hilarious that the lessons took twice as long as scheduled.  
Kaylee ran a finger gently over the band of embroidery at Tellina's sleeve. "Pretty," she said. "Ummm….nalech. Ka—bo ennum Did you make that?"  
Tellina nodded. "When here we get food, it is almost all ready," she said. "We do not have to pound the grain or make beer or knead bread," she said. "This house is small—not to say bad, only that to wash takes a not long time. We use the box with the small demon you give us, and the dish of fire," (Kaylee blinked until she identified it as an 'electric iron') "for your clothes. But still we have needles, we can make threads from our clothes that torn."   
"I'll tell the General," Kaylee said. "Permaybehaps" (Tellina wrote this down on a small pad she kept in her sleeve) "We could pay you more, for the fancy embroidery."   
"Sit and please drink tea? Your man, good lottery?" Tellina asked politely, looking at Kaylee's rings and pushing a small bowl of hot tea, the twigs of the infused herbs breaking the surface, toward Kaylee.  
Kaylee stopped to think that over, then said, "Naw, we pick our own husbands. Not a lottery. Ronnie—my husband is great. Much love for him."  
"Me, I had bad lottery," Tellina said. "My children I did not want, because they were always from when he was home, always he wanted his Rights. He go away to fight, I laughed. He died, I laughed more. So is sinful. I pray many times, to get forgive."   
"Oh, honey," Kaylee said, her eyes welling as she patted Tellina's shoulder, "God will take care of you. I think he owes you. Owes you a lot. Loremma."  
54.  
Simon finished an eleven-hour shift, went back to the house, and in seconds found himself flying in the direction of the bed, with his clothes heading in the other.   
Not long afterward, Avon, by dint of long practice, smoothly rolled out such limbs as were pinned down, and asked Simon what he wanted for dinner.   
"Omakase," Simon said.  
Avon zipped up his trousers, found a t-shirt and a pair of sandals, and went to see if there was any malt vinegar left in the cupboard. There was a nice piece of wrenfish in the chiller, and, by dint of practice, he had become quite good at frying chips in a wok.  
55.  
"You don't like me," Avon said.

"No," River said. "I like Orac, though. Better than Medora. She's kind of saccharine."  
"Ah. And now I see what Plunkett means by 'Job's comforters.'"

Orac liked River too, which sped up Orac's analysis of the optimum formulation and delivery of a Pylene-50 antidote by reducing the volume of pro forma objections to wasting time. The samples of the drug smuggled out by the Resistance had already been analyzed, and the chemical compound of the drug was fairly clear; the problem was to pinpoint its effects and how to counteract them.  
Simon, as River never stopped reminding him, wasn't all that hot an organic chemist, so he had very little to do with the Pylene-50 project. That meant that Avon and River had to work closely together, a prospect that frankly terrified Avon. He was able to persuade River that he qualified to work on the project because he had worked his way through University cooking bathtub amphetamines, and had successfully brewed a large batch of parmexion as an audition piece. The various MedEvac craft still carried tubs of it for antisepsis and sedation.   
"Kerr, why are you even still here?" River asked, as she suggested yet another molecule for Orac's consideration. "I'm here based on GP because I have a job, Simon's here because this is where I am."  
"I suppose I'm flapping about like a bat out of heaven," Avon said. "I know I don't belong here, but I'm not moving very fast because I'm looking about me in sheer curiosity."   
"You're being selfish. Simon would be better off without you."  
"I wonder about that," Avon said. "I mean, that he'd be better without me. My being selfish is an axiom. The last few years, your brother been running his arse off, finding you first and then trying to take care of you in an environment where the odds are overwhelmingly against him and he doesn't know the rules."  
"I got better. I'm better now."  
"To a degree. But that hasn't helped Simon's case at all, you know. It's as if he put on the brakes as hard as he could, but not in time to avoid crashing into a brick wall. You might say that we three have been taking it turns to have a nervous breakdown, like the Furies passing around the eye and the tooth. Or Blake's Council passing around the brain cell. You had Simon. I didn't have anyone."  
"You had Mal."  
"He wasn't the greatest help. At any rate, my…troubles….started well before I ever met him."  
"Then you had your crews."  
"I assure you, River, they were less than no help at all. But things are better for Simon, we know that he's going to be all right, because now we're both here to take care of him."  
"Take care of him. Sure. Like everybody you ever loved."  
"But I don't love him, I love Blake…" Avon blurted, then clamped his jaw to a halt. "I don't say things like that. Is that why they scrambled your brains, then? To make you an interrogator?"  
"How lucky for Simon, then. That he's safe. From you, anyway."  
They stared at each other. River would have been perfectly comfortable sitting there for days, in stony silence, so Avon broke the silence.   
"About this Pylene-50 affair…your father isn't a doctor, is he?"  
River shook her head. "A businessman."  
"That's…{{funny}} sad," Avon substituted.  
"Simon hasn't figured it out. Don't tell him."  
"Don't you think he might figure it out, without any paranormal…carry-on? I did."  
"You did, because you don't trust anybody. He won't, because he doesn't want to know. And as for his psi…it's practically useless, or worse. It's like having two left feet! And a hangover!"  
56.  
"I'll have to make this a quick one," Wash said, knowing that Ronnie thought it was a big night out when he had a second half-pint of near-beer at the OGCR. "Got to get back and give The Vick her bath," a task that Wash greatly enjoyed. The bath toys were an even greater spur to improvisation than the dinosaurs he now kept in a plastic pouch to transport from cockpit to cockpit. He was less enthusiastic about diaper changes, particularly since he was unable to cover the diaper with a tiny suit of body armor and a cute little football helmet. Wash, who had always thought of himself as timorous and easily startled, like an antelope, now realized for the first time, as no encounter with Reavers or Niska's home improvement power tools had ever shown him, how dangerous the world was.  
Ronnie and Kaylee lived at the north end of Corridor K in the Married Quarters; Wash and Zoe lived at the south end of Corridor J, so Wash walked Ronnie over and headed to his own home. Kaylee had denuded Brikkling's storehouses of all their blue gingham, so there were curtains tacked to the wall where the window would be if there was one, cushions for the chair, and a cheerful ribboned cover over the army-issue blankets.  
Until recently, Zoe and Wash's room had been Spartan—Zoe didn't see the point—but Wash had persuaded her to apply gigantic decals of frolicsome bunnies and ducks not just on the cradle, but all over the walls.   
When Wash patted the fingerprint sensor, Zoe was sitting up in bed, feeding Vickie and reading a bookplax about sailing vessels in the Napoleonic War; she was interested in ancient warfare.  
Wash stood in the doorway, watching the glorious woman and the golden child, and tried to freeze the memory to save for his last moment. Also, although he and Zoe had enjoyed various kinds of terrific pregnant-lady sex back in the day when she was pregnant, certain old favorites had been returned to the repertoire, and he thought perhaps some of them would be deployed that evening, if Vickie got off to sleep on schedule. She was what was called a "good" baby, although Wash couldn't really attribute bad motives to an infant, and he didn't think that Zoe would want an excessively deferential daughter even if what the kid wasn't deferring to, was Zoe herself.  
He was quite close to misting up at the sight of his family, when he reminded himself that The Vick might eventually turn into an older sister (Blake wouldn't like it, but screw **him**, and Wash was determined to love all of his children equally. Even though they would probably grow up to call him a dinosaur (and not in the good way either) and do things he would never approve of.   
57.  
"You see, Kerr, if you can't settle down and stop being nervous about his giving you the push, you'll make him so nervous he'll give you the push for sure," Brikkling said. "History repeating itself. Once as tragedy, once you're out on your arse hoping you remembered to put your good cufflinks and the key to the safe deposit box in your suitcase." Brikkling slid his chair back a little, sending it into the bedframe. He expected to make quite a good thing out of selling small, easily shipped, and expensive trinkets to Avon to adorn the house, until it looked like a cross between a bird's nest seductively trimmed with bits of down and Brikkling's granny's parlor, where every flat surface was covered with dusty plastic "A Present From Epinal" mugs and Presidential Inauguration plates.  
"Cozy, this lot," Brikkling said. "Good thing I'm not claustrophic. Sorbette would've given me the keys to street if our house wasn't fifteen times the size of this. Well, she would've done it even sooner than she really did."  
Avon contradicted the fury of his glare by replenishing his guest's brandy snifter, although he reflected as he did so that he was doling out liquor that had been purchased at exorbitant cost from the man who was drinking it now. "I don't know why I should be taking advice about...about...love-affairs from someone who's working hard for the first time in his life—on his second divorce."

It took more than that to discomfit Brikkling. "That's what I dreamed about when I was a kiddie. That I'd grow up to be rich enough to get taken to the cleaners by exotic dancers. And now I'm living the dream."

"You really can't expect me to believe that," Avon said. "You didn't grow up in Space City, you grew up in the Domes of Earth-that-Was, so how could you even have envisaged that as an ambition?"

Brikkling said, "Can't believe you'd be that naive, Kerr. 'Course there were. You couldn't always find your margarine ration, but you could always find a "gentleman's club." The margarine probably went to pay the girls, come to think of it. That's how you winkle your Delta's wallet open, y'know. Call him a gentleman. And I'm profiting by it now."

58.  
General Marrth sent a Wave, explaining (or, rather, stating; he never **explained** that a respected warrior had applied for Tellina's hand in marriage. The General had granted it. The ceremony would be performed by proxy in one week. Tellina's brother, a pilot, would pick her up the next time he had leave.  
Kaylee's friend Lenitra, who transcribed the incoming Cortex feeds, told Kaylee about it, and Kaylee rushed over to the Watal house. Kaylee, her eyes streaming, hugged Tellina and said that it was a damn shame that anyone would even think about it, but she was sure that General Blake would find a way to work something out, if Kaylee had to kick his butt all the way from here to Slater's Moon.   
Tellina shook her head. "Will be done, there is nothing." She picked up the Illustrated History of Earth-that-Was (Basic Standard Edition) that she read out loud to the compound's children. It entertained them, or at least kept them quiet for a while, and allowed her to practice her vocabulary. "I am not Helen of Troy," she said. "To start a war, it would not make me happy. And to our men, what is one more war? They always have one."   
"Awww, at least you'll have your kids," Kaylee said. "They'll make you feel better."  
Tellina shook her head. "My new husband is an important man. No man wants to be—guzztoul?"  
"Stuck," Kaylee said.  
"With another man's childs. Not-important man cannot say, don't stuck me, but important man can."  
Kaylee tried to stop sobbing so she could help her friend. "That's terrible! That's the worst thing I ever heard, to take away a mother's children."  
"No, Kaylee, don't be afraid. I'm an evil sinner," Tellina said. "Never loved them enough. To look at them, I think of picking bad lottery and all the time those Rights. Now there will be more Rights, more children, but maybe many sons and much....which word in Standard is appanem?"  
"There ain't exactly just one," Kaylee said. "But, ummm, maybe prestige, or admiration, or respect."  
Tellina started to reach for her pad, then gave a shrug to show that she would never need her become fluent in Standard.  
59.  
"I tried to stop her, General," Fru Bjornstrom said from the outer office. Kaylee stormed through the door.  
"Tellina says you're gonna make her go back to that awful place," Kaylee said. "How can you do that?"  
"General Marrth is our ally," Blake said. "An alliance that was created out of mutual need, not out of mutual liking, let me assure you."   
Blake put his hand over Inara's and squeezed, smiling a little at her. "I couldn't do without Inara personally, of course. I couldn't keep going without her inspiration, and without knowing that there is someone and somewhere I can always go for refreshment of my spirit. But more to the point, the Rebellion can't do without her. War is merely the immoral equivalent of diplomacy, you know. A battle averted is always better than a battle fought, even a victory. Kaylee, if we win, we will have to govern. It won't help our case if one of our new subjects remembers how hungry he was after his water buffalo was killed in a bombing raid. Let alone how he'll feel as he visits the graveyard where his relatives lie. If there is an alternative to a battle, we will take it."  
From what I've heard" (and he squeezed Inara's hand again, tighter), "Lieutenant Reynolds' plans didn't always go quite to form when he was your Captain Reynolds. There were times when he had to bring Zoe and Jayne along to help him shoot his way out of a situation. But, as I'm sure you're aware, there were situations where Zoe's and Jayne's presence was enough to avert the need for shooting. If we can have enough allies—or allies who are frightening enough!—then there will be fewer battles, and sometimes it can be our allies' troops in the front line instead of ours. It's not even easy to maintain an empire," Blake said, "One where all of the conquered people are expected to satisfy a central Imperial programme. It's a good deal harder to bring together a group of equals. The Federation insists on imposing one set of rules on everyone. One of the things we have to offer them is the chance to maintain their own traditions."  
"Well, why'd they have to start with the tradition of makin' life suck if you happen to be a woman?" Kaylee asked. "And if that's where they started, why've you got to let 'em keep it?"  
60.  
Corporal Jarboe took a newspaper from the rack in the OGCR, got a persimmon bubble tea from the dispenser, and clicked the newspaper on and watched the headlines. There had been a drive-by shooting in a shopping precinct on Darlon-IX, so it made the first screen of all the newspapers in the system.  
"Look at that!" Jarboe told the miscellaneous group that had happened to gather at the table nearest the drinks dispenser. "I mean, it's hardly past Midsummer….I mean, Midwinter…" (Jarboe found the Gauda Prime weather rather difficult to cope with) and already they've got Christmas decorations up! They can't wait to exploit false consciousness to extort money from the protelarians!"  
River deduced that Jarboe had been hanging around with Connie, although Connie would be a little disappointed in the success of her lessons.  
"Reindeer really do know how to fly," River said. "If the roof you throw them off is high enough up." She gave a smile that violated the Geneva Code, and skipped away before someone could call Simon and suggest that he put her back on medication.  
61.  
The Operative looked at Commissioner's Sleer's flight plan. Then he scrolled up on his heavily encrypted hand-held Cortex reader. Eventually, Tenxhobre's complaint, or back-channel non-complaint, had reached Central Security, and Colonel Svioboda determined that the matter should be resolved with the greatest security and lowest visibility.  
At first the Operative thought, {{For all her defalcations—and for all the incompetence that means there is so much that she does not know, that she ought to know—I really should warn her.}} And then he thought, {{No, I should not.}}   
For a very satisfactory solution, all he had to do, was do nothing, and Justice would be done, as it rarely but sometimes is when bad men stay their hands. And what, in any event, can an Operative do, when he prides himself on having no identity even during an assignment, and fades into a more profound non-existence between one assignment and the next?  
62.  
"You leavin'?" Jayne asked Connie, not unamiably, as Dayna washed up the coffee cups and plates that had held greensalmon jerky and buckwheat crackers.

"Yes, I must go back to the base," Connie said.   
"I'll walk with you a ways," he said. Once they were out the door, he said, "Do me a favor, wouldya? Check the Cortex chatter. I need to know where Commissioner Sleer hangs her hat these days."  
"What for?"

"Present for Dayna," Jayne said.   
Connie tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. "All right," she said, on consideration. "She's the Security Commissioner for an area that comprises Tarius, Luba, Porphyr Major, and Helotrix. She doesn't want to go back to Porphyr Major. Well, she has reasons. She seems to spend most of her time on Helotrix, and she has a ship prepped and an itinerary for one of Helotrix' moons. A constructed moon, I think."

Jayne shook his head. "Never no good associated with them damn things. Messin' with God's prerogative like that…"  
63.  
At the beginning, Kaylee thought it was one of the best days that had ever happened to her, up on the reviewing stand (behind the bulletproof glass), in her best dress uniform, watching the parade go by, looking out for Ronnie and Zoe and Mal marching by. (Wash and River were flying in the air show.) First the color guard marching band, playing the anthem; then the infantry; then the bagpipe band, playing "Men of Auron"; then the artillery, and the support services, which meant that Kaylee had to wait a long time to see her husband and her girls and boys from the Motor Pool.  
It was a cloudy day, cool with an occasional nipping wind. Blake, leonine, glowed with pride, or glowed as his pride marched and vogued and drumlined before him. Inara stood at his side, magnificently gowned and jeweled. The Propaganda Unit filmed everything, for History and for immediate transmission, to encourage those who wanted to stand up for freedom, and discourage those who thought they could wipe out a tiny insurrection and be home before Christmas.  
After a while though, after grinning for the CaptureCam and receiving and returning about a million salutes, Kaylee just hoped that her pop-riveting shoulder wouldn't be too sore the next morning, there was a lot of work to be done on the fighter-bomber _Boudicca_.  
Tschevchenko gave a forty-five minute speech, and Blake gave a five-minute speech that was cheered to the rafters. (Being no fool, he arranged the program in that order.) He said that Bran Foster Day would be an annual event, but perhaps next year they would be celebrating it in a broader variety of venues.  
64.  
"I have calculated the probabilities," Orac said. "Bearing in mind the differences in genetic makeup, medication experience, size and weight, metabolism…."  
"C'mon!" River said. "Get with the program!"  
"The most recent formula you have submitted operates effectively as an antidote to clear the Paxilon from the system, if taken within twelve hours of any Paxilon dosage."  
"What about side effects?" Simon asked. "On a population level, even an unusual side effect will be replicated…"  
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," River and Orac said.   
"I understand your reservations, Simon, but on balance…." Avon said.  
"We'll put the formula on the Cortex. Tell them what the Federation did to them, and what they can do to defend themselves. To self-defend always has risks. We'll give them a choice," Connie said. "They don't have that now."  
"As Tschevchenko said, 'Information is everywhere in chains, but it wants to be free. Because of the memetic interaction between humans and information…." Connie began.  
"…you can't stop the signal," River finished. "In other words, we did it." She put one arm around Simon and one around Connie, and hugged them. Then, with a sinister smile, she reached forward and tousled Avon's hair. As he flinched, Simon grabbed him and kissed him.   
River didn't want Connie to feel alone, so she clasped Connie's hands and whirled her around in a circle, leaning back with her hair flying free.  
65.  
If you'd told Jayne about it in advance, he'd have told you he'd watch it over and over. But he just switched off the viewer. He thought about just leaving it there. After he torched the cracked bones and the few shreds clinging to them, and then just walked away to let the whole building burn, willing to let the whole planet burn until the fuel supply lapsed. But Janye took the disk with him anyway, and gave it to Blake.   
Jayne told Dayna where the disk was and that she could watch it if she wanted but he didn't think she'd want to because justice was one thing but this was too damn much.  
There was narration, in a crisp dark voice. That the dead bodies on Miranda, the planet that had been written out of the records, were not the result of a war. There had been no failure of terraforming. There had, however, been a pharmaceutical mishap. The G-32 Paxilon Hydrochlorate, tradenamed The Pax, also known as Pylene-50, had been rather too successful in calming the population and eliminating aggression. Thirty million people treated--an entire populace. And nearly thirty million dead, as they stopped doing…everything. As they lay down and died.  
But things don't always turn out as anticipated. There are…paradoxical reactions. Ancient children on Ritalin, calmed by a stimulant. About a tenth of a percent of the population had an increased aggressor response. When they could find someone living, they killed. And…did things."  
The narration ended then, and the picture began. Servalan would not have been caught dead in the drab Civil Authority uniform. Sleer, unable to make use of its one useful feature—a .45 with 12 in the clip—was. While she pondered which of her assailants to shoot first (but she was never very warlike, when her own skin was at stake), and then ratcheted up a tremulous arm to shoot herself in the head…  
The Reavers fell on her, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And out of the front-row client came forth couture.   
When it happened, the Operative stood nearby, his sidearm holstered, his camera whirring on its tripod, recording it all. He processed the disk, leaving it for the next arrival to find, and it merely happened to be Jayne; it could have been anyone or no one, depending on who inquired how earnestly exactly what had happened about Uncle Max's new job in that far-off place.  
After seeing it happen, the Operative calmed himself with his breath, and prepared to fight his way through the Reavers, unconcerned about whether or not he would fall. They merely flicked their blank, fiery eyes at him (like a glimpse behind a furnace grate) and let him pass, either glutted or exercising professional courtesy.  
66.  
**TamoRex (TRX) TRADING HALTED**  
Gabriel wasn't angry enough at Regan to appropriate one of her service weapons. Of course, the first thing he thought about was an overdose but he thought he deserved worse than that.  
Most offfice towers in Osiris are wrapped all around in a gleaming skin, with covered passages at ground level for groundcars, and at roof level for helicopters. The air lacks the particulate tang that blocks the stars over St. Albans, but no one rich enough to breathe it unfiltered, ever does so.   
However, TamoRex House, as a great luxury aping Earth that Was styles, \ had a veranda, with French doors that actually opened. Chairs surrounded tables with climate conditioning units to puff up treated air, and parasols to waft it down.   
Gabriel Tam cranked one of the doors open, and stepped outside, striding resolutely past the tables and chairs and over the railing.  
The veranda was on the forty-third floor.  
67.  
Blake handed the documents, on weighty parchment with seals of both lead and red wax, to Inara. "It should be all right," he said. The Federation of Allied Planets, at its highest military, security, and diplomatic levels, knew that the Hereditary Grand Duke of Zashaar was on his deathbed. Although the odds were that one of his sons would kill the other to snatch the diadem, both of the princelings were willing to make a deal with Blake. Zashaar was one of the leading planets in the Organization of Strategic Mineral Exporting Planets, and even if the Federation was willing to offend OSMEP, it would simply give Blake unopposed access to fossil fuel and crystal supplies.   
So, when he asked for safe conduct for Inara Serra, his accredited Minister Plenipotentiary, and her party, the Federation told Central Security, even given the unusual personal circumstances, to shut up and suck it up.   
"It's a good thing we have a full complement here on base," Blake told Inara. "Otherwise this little operation would end up denuding the base!"  
68.  
"River said you would perseverate on the lack of appropriate clothing," Avon said, holding up a garment bag in the direction where Simon sat (and had been sitting, for an hour) on the bed.   
Simon unzipped the bag, and ran his hand along one midnight-blue sleeve. "This is beautiful fabric," he said. After a minute, he realized that taking the suit out of the bag might be a good idea. "It's as nice as any of the ones I left hanging in my apartment when I left," he said. "Thank you." There was also a cream silk shirt and a black tie in the bag.  
"I bought it from Vila," Avon said. "I think my volumetric estimates will prove reasonably accurate."   
"I don't think I've seen that suit before," Simon said. "Uhh, the one you're wearing."  
"Malcolm has one rather like it. We used to wear them to defraud investors in."   
Simon squinted as the sunlight hit his eyes. Avon handed him the round red sunglasses that they'd found in Simon's old cabin, one night when they slept on Serenity. He was going to brush back a lock of Simon's hair that flopped onto a sunglass lens, but he stopped given the size of the audience.  
"Oh, man, I'm so sorry," Wash said. "Uh, River's piloting the head car, you might say. We couldn't take Serenity, because the shuttles are all hospitaled up, y'know, so the General let us have the shuttles from the Marcus Garvey. Inara's riding with you, she's got the paperwork. I'm taking the rest."  
"The rest?" Simon asked, and was startled to see a crowd gathering on the tarmac.  
Mal, looking surprisingly different in a pinstriped suit and Beaumonde Cricket Club tie (under his brown coat), patted Simon's arm reassuringly. "Sorry for your trouble, son," he said. "Malcolm, thank you for coming," Avon said. Mal shrugged. "Been a long time dirtside at the base, could use a furlough," he said.   
A comforting ham descended on Simon's shoulder. "Your Pa's offin' himself ain't got a thing to do with you, so if you make yourself feel guilty you're just doin' it to make yourself feel important. Also, good riddance to bad rubbish," Jayne said. "The Reavers bein' mostly his fault and all that. Just goes to show how the wheel goes 'round. Dayna's comin' because, what with your Dad wipin' Servalan off the board, we figure he did her a solid."  
There was a wail, which Simon didn't think came from him but he was going to check when Zoe walked past, carrying Vickie and hoping she wouldn't spit up on her full-dress uniform. "I hope he found some peace," Zoe said. "I know you will, Simon. But it all takes time."  
"I know we don't share a faith," Colonel Plunkett said. "But ever since Our Lo…ever since Jesus' male friends deserted him and left only the women to watch at the cross and the tomb, we've been trying to make up for it."   
"Thank you," Simon said. "You're very kind."  
"Saddle up, folks," Wash said. Avon put his arm around Simon's shoulder and led him into the shuttle.  
"K'rr and I are worried about the levels of psychoactive substances in your blood," River said, heading toward the cockpit of the shuttle.  
"I'm perfectly sober," Simon said.  
"That's what we're worried about," Avon said, handing him a tin cup half-full of brandy. Inara, in a shimmering sari, embroidered in white and silver, her hair covered by a light veil (the magnificent robes appropriate for Gauda Prime Base's representative at a state funeral), sat next to Simon. Once again, she silently held his hand. She was glad to be able to repay him somewhat for saving Blake's life, and she had often burned incense for him. It was, inevitably, awkward for her when he took up with Avon, although Inara did understand that it had very nearly been a crime of ideological rather than sexual passion.   
Inara also wondered if, subliminally, she had registered Simon as a possible rival for Mal's attentions on Serenity, although, as it turned out, neither Inara nor Simon had ever slept with Mal. Inara rated Mal fairly low on the Kinsey scale (Mal would say that, if there was any sort of scale whatever, she rated him fairly low on it).   
"What did they cremate?" Simon blurted. "The sidewalk…for a three-block radius?" which was so exactly what everyone was thinking that they all burst out laughing.  
River seethed with fury all the way there, leaving Simon as the only person who was genuinely upset. Funerals often turn into pretty good parties anyway, so the riders in the second shuttle, bolstered by a bottle of Mother's Ruin brand gin, imported from St. Albans, got boisterous enough (and Dayna won 1,372 credits playing Texas Hold 'Em) to have to spend the approach to landing settling themselves down and looking solemn.  
"Simon. I see that, after disgracing yourself and failing to observe any of the serious obligations of a son toward his father, you have made an appearance for the least important one. And who, may I ask, is this heavily armed canaille trailing behind you?" Regan said.  
"We're his family," Wash told her.  
69.  
River was the last one to climb out of the shuttle, delaying the post-landing checks until she reminded herself that she was crazy, but she wasn't a coward. She climbed out onto the runway, and stood facing her mother, one full-dress uniform confronting another. Simon ducked out from under Avon's arm and went to stand behind her. Everyone who was carrying a gun pulled it out, although Jayne and Dayna were the only ones unsubtle enough to actually rack them.

"You sold us all," River said. "You betrayed us. You betrayed me. You were supposed to protect me. You're my mother, aren't you?" She stopped, and tilted her head, repeating it as a real rather than a rhetorical question.

"Those of us who are…better off are frequently accused of sending the children of the poor to fight their battles," Regan said.   
"'War is good business, invest your daughter'?" Simon asked. No one paid any attention. It struck him that he was probably channeling much of River's early experience of Osiris.  
"Our family has always received the best that Core civilization has to offer. It was time to give something back. The best families should not just be involved in the fight, but leading it. And I had such ambitions for you."   
"A rusted hulk at the bottom of the sea? Bones are coral made? That was your ambition?"  
"Of course not," Regan said. "The Academy has always been devoted to training the elite Parliamentary Operatives. I…wasn't selected, I've always been simply an intelligence officer. The intention was that you could surpass me. You could be the Operational Commander in Chief."  
"What are you complaining about?" River wailed. "You were allowed to have a life. You could have a **name**. Whatever you thought, whatever you felt, you could know that it was real and it was yours and it wasn't put there, there wasn't a slice cut inside you to put it in."  
"Chance isn't good enough," Regan said. "Not for my daughter. Everything was done to, to, improve you. And if **he ** hadn't interfered at a critical point, then it all would have worked the way it should."  
"And that was the point?" River said. "Which Moloch's furnace was I thrown in? Did they, did you, do it to create a super-soldier?"

"Super-soldiers? We wouldn't waste ten plat on developing those," Regan said. "Soldiers are the least valuable elements in society, sacrificed for policy's sake and because we don't want that trash on our streets. If you're really in command, soldiers are the shit you scrape off your shoe."  
A priest approached, impatient to conclude the ceremonies. He saw that Inara was properly dressed for a funeral, so he appealed to her mutely with his eyes. Inara bowed her head, and created a procession by walking in the direction of the nearby temple.  
70.  
The two shuttles landed, and a lot of people who didn't expect to have any positive feelings about Gauda Prime Base were glad to be home.   
"Oh, uh, here," Mal said. They didn't remember to burn the Hell Money they brought, and Mal finally figured out Dayna's tells, so he won most of it in the inbound poker game. Simon stared at it, not sure of what to do with it, so he nodded and folded up the bills and put them in the pocket of his new suit.   
"It's a little awkward," Simon said. "I feel like I took him away from you…" He gave a spectral smile, but Mal was glad to see it all the same. "Or maybe bought him from you at a garage sale."  
"I must say, sometimes I see the two of you, or see him, and it's like seein' some whim-wham that you took out of the shed and sold on for three plat, stuck up on someone's mantelpiece, and you think maybe it warn't as all-fired ugly as you thought it was." He patted Simon's shoulder. "But don't worry, final sale and all."  
"You break it, you bought it," Simon said, thinking that it was more accurate that Avon was stuck with what he had glued together.  
71.  
**TamoRex (TRX) 8 3/8 **  
When Connie got back to Gauda Prime Base with the Porphyresque Regalia, she knew that she should have turned the jewels over to the General. However, she knew that planning and completing the mission on her own initiative, even successfully, was not certain to get her into the War College, or even keep her out of the brig. So she gave the Regalia to Inara, who kept them in the most secure safe on the base until the right time. (Connie suspected that Inara's remedy for insomnia was to take a hand mirror into the vault and try them on.)   
When Sleer was still alive, it wasn't the right time, because the fact that the jewels had been returned could be spun as evidence that she had never stolen them. Just as she said all along.  
In the fullness of time, when the wheel turned, the package delivered to the Parliamentary Commission of Porphyr Major was very thoroughly tested, especially when the chain of deliveries and re-routings eventually seemed to trace back to Gauda Prime.   
The Bomb Squad dunked the package in a sealed tank of water. It did not explode, although the velvet casket was ruined. Once dried off, the jewels and their precious settings were just fine. And so was the capture of Inara explaining that the priceless heritage of the Porphyrians, stolen by the Federation, was being returned to the people by the Rebellion, which would willingly assist them in reclaiming their birthright.  
Afterwards, Connie swore Mal to secrecy and told him the whole story. He guffawed until he had to wipe his eyes. "I'm glad that you tangled with that vicious bitch and came out on top," Mal said. "I'da worried, if I'd known you were goin' up against her."  
"Who? That Sleervalan person?" Connie asked.  
"How art the mighty fallen." Mal reflected that it doesn't matter very much who's at the top of the heap, to those down at the bottom supporting the pyramid. "Naaa, I meant the other one. Bridge-o-Cin, or whatever she's callin' herself these days."   
"'Vicious bitch'? Is that what you think about women?" Connie asked.  
"No, it ain't! And I'll be here hidin' behind Zo's skirts if you don't believe me! Connie, if I didn't think there was somethin' out of the way about a woman bein' a vicious bitch, I wouldn't bother to mention it. Like…wet water, or trigger-happy Jayne or some other waste of breath. Anyway, women is a little more'n half of everybody, so even if a man is…say, five times as likely to be an asshat as a woman, that leaves five percent of all the bad stuff done by women."  
"I don't think your arithmetic is quite correct," Connie said. "But I concede your point."  
72.  
_I called thee then vain flourish of my fortune  
I called thee then poor shadow painted queen,  
The presentation of but what I was,  
The flattering index of a direful pageant,   
One heaved a-high to be hurled down below […]  
For one being sued to, one that humbly sues;  
For queen, a very caitiff crowned with care;  
For she that scorned at me, now scorned of me;  
For she being feared of all, now fearing one;  
For she commanding all, obeyed of none,  
Thus hath the course of justice whirled about  
And left thee but a very prey to time,  
Having no more but thought of what thou wast,  
To torture thee the more, being what thou art. _ (Richard III, IV, iv, 82-85, 100-108)

**TamoRex(TRX) 11 5/8, up 2 on reports of possible acquisition**  
Heaviness endures for a night, but joy, or at least resignation, comes in the morning.  
Federation Security Commissioner Svioboda, wearing her gray dress uniform with a black armband, cranked open the blinds in her new office.   
Evidently Luba was one of those planets with a green sun. The office was choked with file cabinets, suggesting that Luba was a poor sort of place, still dependent on hard copy. And every one of those file cabinets was stuffed with papers and acetates, each one of which could be in the wrong place.  
And probably was, Commissioner Svioboda thought, as her adjutant slouched into the room. It didn't take telepathy to detect that the aerodynamically inefficient redhead resented her new boss' very presence. Doubtless the girl had expected to inherit Commissioner Sleer's post when it so spectacularly fell vacant. Although, as far as the new Commissioner could tell, the girl had gone AWOL immediately after the break-in was supposed to have occurred, before Sleer reported it, and she hadn't returned until a few days before Regan herself arrived on-planet.  
"I'm…uh, I'm sorry," the adjutant said, unable to think of anything both so comprehensive and so noncommittal.  
"The Pacification program has suffered a serious blow," the Commissioner told her briskly. "That doesn't mean it can't recover. Civilization will always prevail over barbarism."  
Regan started to sort through the papers in the Outbox. "Well, that's convenient," she said. "The initials haven't changed. What was Commissioner Sleer's first name?"  
"Ruth," Saffron told her.  
73.  
**TamoRex (TRX) 17, down 3 on reports of successful drug test by rival Schering-MerVantis**  
Very shortly before his extreme-sports stroll, Gabriel Tam took his latest will out of the document safe, wrote REVOKED in black ink on the top and bottom half of each of the forty-seven pages in the document, and slashed a diagonal cut through all of the pages and the backing.  
That made it fairly clear that he had destroyed the will with the intention of revoking it, although for years afterwards, LegAcad exams dealt with the fascinating question of what happens if, under Osiran law, where 100% of the estate of a man who dies intestate, survived by one or more sons, is divided among his sons, with a double portion to his eldest son, the eldest son is a wanted felon. It would be quite clear what would happen if the eldest son were a convicted felon, because his civil rights would have been forfeited, and the estate would have been divided among the other sons in equal shares. If the original eldest son were known to have died, his next-youngest brother would succeed him as eldest son. But if his status—alive, dead, disappeared, Non-Person, were simply unknown? It was a conundrum to rival Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, a Chanukah lamp that could keep burning not for days but for years until the estate, proving itself not to be a burning bush, was consumed.  
74.  
Blake thought of Ronnie as, in some sense, his protégé, and Kaylee would always be welcome as Inara's friend, so Blake liked to have dinner for four served in his private quarters. That night, they had roasted Greensalmon, with pannays and some of the first crop of hydroponic pea shoots.   
Ronnie said that sooner rather than later military operations would expand to the point that promoting at least one other General would be necessary. Blake said that he thought "Generalissimo Besuki" sounded rather comic-opera and he wouldn't like to sound equally ridiculous. . "Field Marshall Blake" was just possible. Blake thought that "Marshall Blake" sounded a bit less overblown. Ronnie said that it sounded like a Saturday-afternoon vizzio about Pre-Atomic Earth-that-Was. But then he grew pensive. "I think that was my first impulse toward the Cause," he said. "Watching the Marshal come into town and clean it up, being brave no matter who tried to stop him from doing the right thing."  
They had small cups of coffee (mostly ceremonial; the grounds had been used rather too often) and some Chateau Brikkling armagnac after the Victoria sponge filled with hodgeberry jam and cream. "The magic of the Free Market," Ronnie toasted.  
Inara cleared her throat, remembered that she was a diplomat, and responded, "The Invisible Hand!"  
75.  
**TamoRex (TRX) 19 ½, steady**  
River told Avon that the approach of Simon's birthday always made him very, very nervous, but she didn't tell him why. Avon assumed it was because twenty-nine sounded almost like thirty and Simon thought that turning thirty would reduce his attractiveness to other men. Avon would have predicted that he'd be in favor of anything that gave Simon delusions of reduced attractiveness and therefore delayed the inevitable, but he surprised himself by finding that a rather dishonorable line of thought.  
So, not at all for Simon's birthday, by any means, Avon had the building crew knock together a shed with a shower and a very, very small tub—just big enough for one person asserting some space, or for two people who were on very good terms.  
Simon came back from work, washed, poured a glass of wine from the carafe, and climbed into the tub. He hugged one knee in toward his chest, stretched the leg, and rested his foot on the rim of the tub, next to Avon's head. Avon nuzzled the foot companionably.   
"I'm…I don't know…all that money. I don't know if I, we, should even try to get it."  
"Well, I have no objection to continuing to keep you," Avon said. "In light of your greater professional success, it might disturb the balance if we were both rich."   
"I guess River should have some of it, all of it, maybe, I don't know, but it would have to be in trust…you know, last week, she paid three hundred twenty-five credits….almost a month's pay!—for a **pair of shoes**. I mean, it's not her fault, but she's an **idiot** about money."  
"She could learn, I'm sure."   
"But…it's…I don't know, I wouldn't want to take blood money anyway."  
"Leaving aside the fact that that's literally what you get paid for—well, you would if Blake paid you—I should be quite surprised if Servalan actually paid for the Pylene-50. And that was only a very small part of TamoRex' revenues." {{Regret is a part of life}} he could hear himself saying, back then. "I'm sure that nearly all of your inheritance came from whatever useful drugs weren't placebos or replete with conventionally lethal side effects."  
76.  
Considering that her parents were dead and that nobody would go to Silmareno if they didn't have to, Connie used up the rest of her leave allowance on a visit to Brikkling's new house in Freedom City, which he shared with his girlfriend Sherleese. (Sorbette got the old house, the mortgage of which coincidentally formed part of a collaterized portfolio that had frequently been sold by Avon's and Mal's real estate finance subsidiary.)   
The Brikkling mini-mansion was within walking distance of the Basilica, which allowed Connie the great treat of going to Mass every day. She was not sure if she was entitled to receive Communion or not, because on her second day there, she went to Confession, and admitted to taking the name of the Lord in vain and often having impure thoughts. The priest told her to stop wasting his time, just look at the length of the queue out there. Connie had to admit that there were plenty of punters lined up to confess, and she wasn't sure if getting eight-sixed operated as absolution or not.  
After her leave, when she got back to Gauda Prime base, she discovered that she had been promoted to Captain, and her application to the War College had been granted. General Blake's adjutant, Dorol Ahearne, whispered to her that in the future, displays of initiative that were any less successful or any harder for the brass to pretend never happened could be prejudicial to her future career.   
There had been something of a bidding war. Intelligence asked Connie to transfer, but she wanted to finish her secondment and return to Generalissimo Besuki's forces.   
Lieutenant Reynolds also applied for a transfer to Intelligence. He later said that it was one thing to turn a fellow down, they didn't have to be outright mean about it. However, when General Blake adopted the Planning Council's recommendation of a Cavalry force, (because they often fought in places where forage was easier to come by than petrol, crystals, or paved roads), Mal, muttering that it was nice for a fella to be wanted, transferred to the Cav and sewed its hand-embroidered Mule badge on his brown coat.  
77.  
Gauda Prime Base personnel were assigned to rotate among three shifts, although a certain amount of trading shifts was permitted. Blake worried a little about morale on the Night Shift, although he suspected that those who volunteered—as Avon would have done if Blake maintained any shred of influence over him—liked the solitude and the absence of bustle. Sometimes when Blake couldn't sleep, he put on an old pair of trousers and a roll-neck jersey, or a set of scrubs borrowed from the hospital wing, and took around the tea trolley and chatted with the Night Shift. He always felt faint trepidation beforehand, remembering that when Harry LeRoy walked through the darkened camp, he didn't always hear what he wanted to hear.  
The Handover meeting took place every day as the last half-hour of the Day Shift overlapped with the first half hour of the Midshift. There was no formal meeting between Midshift and Night Shift, but the Midshift Duty Officer was charged with posting a summary of the shift's events to the CenComm Bulletin Board.   
The first Wednesday Handover meeting of every month was for ceremonies, so Blake awarded the Stannis Star to Captain Villaruegas, and gave Jayne a Civilian Commendation for Operation Miranda. Jayne had it framed, and gave it to Dayna for her birthday, in the same box as the red-lace-lavished orchid silk cami-knickers that he bought from Brikkling.  
River sent a note of congratulations to Colonel Tarrant, who was now in charge of the garrison at Winterreise, after General Marrth's guerilla force, in fierce fighting, secured the planetoid for the Rebellion.   
78.  
**TamoRex (TRX) 24, up 1 1/8 after quarterly report showing success in cost control **  
Avon threw the brown paper parcel on the bed. He considered sweeping it onto the tatami mat and throwing Simon onto the bed, but Simon had the cooking chopsticks in one hand and was sprinkling sesame oil with the other, so Avon said, "Why did Brikkling give me a parcel and why did he smirk when he gave it to me?"  
"Go ahead, open it," Simon said.  
It proved to contain several white t-shirts and pairs of black tights, and two pairs of soft black leather ballet slippers. It also contained a receipt. Avon flinched and considered blanching.  
"River is going to be giving a ballet class in the OGCR," Simon said. "Inara thinks it'll be good for her to get to order people around!"  
"She's just been promoted to Group Captain," Avon said. "Shouldn't that be good enough?"  
"…And, assuming that little girls' fascination for ballet applies cross-culturally, it could help with the integration of the Watal girls into the community…"  
"Then I suppose you won't be allowed within a kilometer of them."  
"That's adult women, River says it's all right for girls up to age ten."  
"That shows a surprising degree of naivete on their part. As well as the ineffectiveness of the charges against Blake. Well, I suppose it makes sense for you to get two pairs of shoes at once, they may be hard to find when you wear out a pair…"  
"We wear the same size shoes, you know," Simon said, smiling reminiscently at the thought of things that were just in the right place for easy access.  
"You've gone mad if you think that…"

"Wanna bet?" Simon said, lifting the lid on the rice cooker.   
The exchange cheered Avon immensely, because he knew that for a surgeon to start ordering people around was the equivalent of an invalid sitting up and taking nourishment.  
79.  
**TamoRex (TRX) 49 ¼, up 5 on strong quarterly results **  
Blake shook his head. He ran a finger around his neck to loosen the tight, starched collar. It was summer, and it was cooler with the office door and the windows open a bit, but, inevitably, it was also noisier in his office. The current muted racket sounded exactly like Avon arguing with someone in Major Xiang's office.   
Blake got to his feet and walked two offices over. It **was** Avon arguing with Ronnie Xiang.  
"What the hell are you doing here, Avon?"  
"This damned fool thinks that just because he has a business degree—as if those had any academic validity anyway!--he knows how to run a banking system…"  
"What makes you…never mind, you think you know everything. But why does **either one of you** have to know how to run a banking system?"  
"Well, in a Universe that produced the platypus, your band of idiotic amateurs fueled with your delusional Cause might win. It wouldn't be the strangest thing ever to happen."  
"I don't know why you're still here," Blake said. "I should think that someone with your finely-honed self-preservation instincts would prefer to be anywhere but here. I wouldn't order it, of course, but I haven't the energy to protect you from anyone who thinks I'd want to be rid of a troublesome…well, not priest by any means."  
"It's been tried," Avon said first, and then, "Do you honestly think I care?"  
Blake looked at him for a moment, and said, "You fucking idiot."  
Avon looked at him for a moment, and said, "I'm sorry."  
Blake said, "Well, if you haven't got any work to do, I have."  
Avon let him have the last word.  
Kaylee climbed down from the stepladder (she figured that the shiny, prickly green leaves and their pretty red berries in the garlands she made for the hallways were probably poisonous—around here, near to everything was—but they were hung high enough to keep the kids' sticky fingers out of them). She reminded herself to check with River that the "Bomfelz Belrrhout" banner she put up was spelled right and didn't mean anything obscene. Not that any of the Watals except the kids, who were mostly too little to read, would see it.  
_Well_ Kaylee thought. _If that ain't a real Christmas miracle._


End file.
